Re Bluesky I did some "I am not a lawyer" digging.
Bluesky is owned by "Bluesky Social PBC", a Public Benefit Company registered in Delaware.
Generally speaking it means when decisions about the company are made, they must take into account how that decision benefits their stated public value. I struggled to find the specific value wording, but let's assume it's a reasonable one for the time being.
Unfortunately being a PBC is basically voluntary, especially when you're still a private company. You can become a non-PBC with a simple board vote. (A public company would require a stockholder vote.)
Bluesky's board consists of four members, one of which is Bain Capital, aka the company funding Bluesky.
So Bluesky is absolutely a better alternative to Twitter. If everyone left Twitter and moved to Bluesky that would be a monumental improvement.
However Bluesky is not a non-profit company, as the above graphic states.
Trivago isn't completely "owned" by Expedia, but Expedia does own a majority of the company stock. Its headquarters are in Germany, and 100% of its employees are there.
Booking.com is 100% owned by Priceline, a US company. They also have a long string of international controversies.
Shout-out to Sharkey! We're young, hip and have reactions other than "heart". Plus, we can talk to Mastodon instances and it all just works. Ever thought what your social network needed was unlockable achievements? We've got that, too!
The shareholders expect growth and therefore increase in the value of their investment, public benefit companies are however under no obligation to their shareholders to pass on profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. It's definitely not a non-profit either though, it's a different structure.
Plenty of "regular" for profit companies focus on increasing share value by investing profits back into the company instead of paying out dividends. That doesn't really mean anything.
Edit: I see what you mean based on what I said. They expect a return on investment is a better way to phrase it.
FreeCAD is a start, but nowhere as good as AutoCAD, unfortunately. I haven't tried GIMP's v3.0 version yet, but 2.x is terrible to use. Depending on what you need to do, Krita would be a better alternative.
The best alternative to commercial CAD systems is commercial CAD systems if you know what I mean. That said, FreeCAD is the only option if you want to run on Linux. Inventor, Solidworks, AutoCAD, etc, are all borked even in wine.
I never really cared for onshape/simscale or fusion. Maybe I am just oldschool but the whole browser based thing didn't sit right with me for CAD stuff.
I've worked professionally with a lot of CAD systems in the past (Caria, Solidworks, Siemens NX, Creo ...) and Onshape feels so refreshing compared to all of these "old school" CAD systems.
The git like system to manage to manage version for example works extremely well, performance wise it can be used on a potato and being browser based it can be used on Linux.
The design process is extremely smooth and intuitive.
My only problem with it is that unfortunately all the data is cloud based and it requires a constant internet connection but so far I have not found a worthy alternative.
Yeah, the versioning and operations history functions a similar to an always refreshing l pdm suite imo which can be handy but I never found it to be all that much better for my needs. I didn't play with the version merging functions much though. The only via internet aspect was a dealbreaker for me from a functional and security perspective.
Word alternative: I started trying out OnlyOffice, based in Latvia. So far it seems decent. Definitely doesn't look as dated as Open- and LibreOffice.
Logic, FL Studio alternative: Audacity is in my opinion not a serious alternative. If you want simple voice overs, sure, but otherwise no. I'd recommend Reaper instead. Not open source, but there aren't many DAWs that are (maybe Ardour, but I don't have experience with it ). Reaper is really open as far as proprietary DAWs go.
There are so many issues with this, lots of wrong information, recommendations of stuff that's bad and really shouldn't be recommended and stuff that really should be there isn't.
Please don't share it this further, it's absolutely shit.
While AT Protocol is sort of federated in a sense, no one really runs aggregators (which serves half of the role an instance does in ActivityPub) besides BlueSky themselves, so they can still control it if they wanted to.
Also, "normal" for profit companies can also pretend to want to bring good to the world. It's misinformation because public benefit companies are allowed to collect a profit (post says non profit).
I still believe BlueSky is world's better than Twitter! But it's important to be honest about it.
Home to Go is just a search engine for VRBO, which is a US company owned by Expedia. It is not a replacement for Airbnb, nor does it stop supporting US companies.
Pretty ironic that the website that created this, buy-european-made.eu, is actually promoting their Reddit community. They should really switch to an EU-hosted Lemmy instance, and also join Mastodon, just like european-alternatives.eu: @[email protected]
AKG is a popular brand in professional music and audiophile circles. It was bought by Samsung in 2016, who promptly drove the company into the ground, closed their Austrian facilities, and moved headquarters to America and production to SE-Asia. AKG's name is now used for brand recognition on Samsung's generic big tech garbage. Yes, I'm still salty about it.
Austrian Audio was founded by the actual engineers who worked at AKG, currently owned by a Danish audio tech company. They produce high-end professional headphones.
Yes, absolutely. Again, not the point of my comment which is the chart the OP posted has some questionable suggestions if you’re picking and choosing businesses based on their political support (which I fully support people doing)
If you are in the market for a vacuum cleaner do yourself a favor, go more expensive and get a Miele, especially if you have some carpets, most vacuums can do a job on hard floors, but damn the difference of vacuuming carpets either a cheap vacuum vs my Miele is night and day.
(Don't know about the rest of their products, but they are german and a family owned business)
Thanks! I'm just a hapless homeowner who occasionally roleplays being handy enough to fix things (though my last shelving unit for my basement came out remarkably level, surprisingly).
(I had actually been hoping to repair the Dewalt, as it's a hand-me-down from my dad (fuck cancer), but I'm pretty sure it'd be a lost cause (the drill is at least 20 years old, probably older, I'm pretty sure I remember my dad using it when I was a kid).)
Yes, they produce mostly abroad afaik. Another somewhat known company from Liechtenstein is cable maker Neutrik. If you've even been in a pro audio or broadcasting studio or a scientific lab, you probably have used their cables.
Consider buying Solovairs instead of Dr martens. They're basically the same, the main difference is that they are made in the UK in a factory that used to make Dr martens before they delocalized their production to Asia
When my Solovair became too worn to wear, they sent me replacement soles, like, the whole bottom half of the shoe, and put me in touch with their repair guy to have them put on. Great service through and through, and lovely people!
This list has some issues, Booking.com is Dutch and Philips' Consumer division is just a name that whitelabels other companies products and is owned by a Chinese investment company.
Booking is 100% owned by Priceline (renamed Booking Holdings). They only paid $113M for the company in 2005. That's a damn steal.
The other travel "alternatives" are either owned by Expedia, majority stock holders by Expedia, or just act as a front end search for Expedia and VRBO. It's honestly ridiculous.
You do know that RedBull is owned by a right-wing extremist in Salzburg who tries to undermine Austrian democracy with Servus TV the same way Murdoch and Springer do in Germany and elsewhere?
The right hand column for “Drinks” can just be tap water barring a few exceptions water in Europe is clean and safe as well as being delicious in some countries!
It still helps because you are buying european which is better for europe also you called every single company in the list fascist with this logic, a lot of them arent, idk what redbull did tho.
It is german but pretty sure its sold by coca cola.
My response to you and the OP is simple: you don't counter faschist stupidity with stupidity, but with nuance. That's the difference between them and us, not where you produce or buy.
But its not just about fascism. If you actually want to counter fascism you dont just go "im not gonna buy this product", you actually have to take action. Anyone thinking a few people not buying a product will change the situation is a bit too optimistic. Even if you stop one of em another one pops up. You have to take action to change the system. But circling back yo buying european its still a pretty good thing overall so that europe can have a stronger economy. Anyone opposing this is like the people who voted for trump becsuse kamala wasnt any better. She was better and she couldve been even better if you voted for her and then protested to make her do what you want.
A large social movement to reduce imports from a given country and support local manufacturing can indeed still be of great benefit and can materially hinder the success of fascism though.
It doesn't help because most of those "euro" options are publicly traded on American stock markets where the fascists make their money lol. You booked on trivago instead of some other place great now that stock went up and the well invested musks of the world just made some money anyway. Money they will use to influence elections all over the world.
Social media gets used by a lot of amateur sports teams, especially ones where the players are kids. There's a lot of parent communication that goes through facebook, instagram, etc.
I would be cautious to trust an American company just because they are non-profit. We know that if they get sufficiently big they can just transition into being for profit (see OpenAi), chances are regulations regarding this won't become stronger later.
Signal being open source of course helps, but it's usually the ecosystem that people grow to rely on that keeps them in place, not the technology. Just look at how big Reddit is compared to Lemmy for a good example of that. If signal was federal that would be quite different since jumping ship would be easy.
It's not just a matter of being a no profit, it's also a matter of business incentives and target customers. Signal survives with donations and specifically targets the more privacy -conscious segment of the general population. They don't have a business model without the current setup, as the moment they advertise, sell data or do anything that violates the implicit contract with customers, their customer base disappears.
OpenAI on the other hand was "open" until it came up with a product, then it immediately stopped being so. But how many people from their customer base care about openness?
For signal also privacy is a core feature, for openAI being "open" was not.
I think the situation is very different, and while we should always check and never trust for free, we need to acknowledge the fundamental structural differences.
A shout out to Austrian Audio (former AKG engineers), Focal, and Meze. Some of the best high-end audio companies for headphones, not that beyer is bad, I just don't personally enjoy their sound signature.
Also on the amp side of things Analogvibes is a German company producing diy tube compressors and equalizer kits for music production. On the pricey side for sure but the quality cannot be beat, they sound and feel absolutely beautiful.
LOL! On one hand, sure, you could say that: the American companies GM and Chrysler don't have a presence in Europe.
But really what happened is more that they have such a big presence in Europe that they got bought out and are now European themselves. I had already known Fiat bought Chrysler to form FCA, but TIL while researching this response that GM Europe (so just the European subsidiary, not the whole thing) got bought out by PSA Peugeot-Citroen. Then PSA and FCA merged to form Stellantis. So, yeah: Chrysler and GM (in Europe) are not only fully-European companies instead of American-owned ones, they're the same European company. 🪦
You should boycott evil corporations regardless of where they are from, don't make it a nationalistic thing, some of the alternative suggested here are as much bad as their usa counterpart. You are not achieving shit by switching from nike to adidas...
The last line on the document says "Perfect is the enemy of good. Every little bit counts."
It's pretty apt. To deal with this particular issue it makes sense to divest from one country to another regardless of brands. Divesting from mega corporations is another issue entirely and beyond the scope of this boycott.
It shows the USA that the people care enough about this specific issue to spend their money elsewhere.
The issue of mega corporations is completely separate of the issue of the USA. It would be best to deal with both, but it's better to deal with one than to do nothing at all.
No you see, when the workers are locked in the burning production plant, it matters a lot if they are are murdered for a billionaire who avoids taxes in the EU, as opposed to a billionaire avoiding taxes in the US.
Afaik its about decreasing reliance on American goods and services due to their tarrifs on the EU, those products and services may not be available in the future so its better to find solutions now then scramble later
I was about to say, pretty sure AMD is more in the states than Nvidia at this point. Either way, both are fabbed in Taiwan. Intel is the only one that mostly fabs in the USA.
Americans probably should have boycotted American products back when Europe put consumer data safeguards in and the US government refused to. Our food safety, our work life, our online data, our health care-- all driven by profit motive in the US but protected as rights in Europe.
These brands all still follow all those rules when they operate in Europe, they just don't bother on the other side. Like we get snicker bars and whatever, but they're just slightly healthier or at least don't contain stuff that's actively bad for you, but they're still shit if that's all you eat. The usual example is Fanta where the difference is really stark.
The snacks section could use a lot of chocolates but then again as European it's hard to find American chocolate: Milka, Ferrero Rocher, Lindt, Tony's Chocolonely, Callier... Just to name a few.
I was surprised to see Toblerone on the American side, apparently they're under an American company nowadays! TIL
Also, Logitech isn't Chinese? Huh, TIL as well
Oh yeah, local chocolatiers tend to be the best, although also by far the most expensive.
In general, in Europe it's easy to avoid foreign products if you buy local (baker's bread, fisher's fish, greengrocers' vegetables, etc.), but also assuming you earn well.
HMD could be mentioned in electronics, they're Finnish and they make smartphones. The CPUs in some of their phones are from Unisoc who are Chinese; maybe some people would want to know that. In their other phones they use Qualcomm CPUs, and Qualcomm are American.
Also there are more alternatives to American goods/services outside of Europe, e.g. goods/services from places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand.
E.g. South Korean cars (Hyundai and Kia) or Taiwanese electronics (Asus, Acer, MSI).
I wonder if that's true, maybe it is. I wonder if Samsung phones have Chinese parts. I think they use Samsung or Qualcomm CPUs, and they're made in Vietnam and India rather than China. Maybe some parts are Chinese, they could well be.
Also there are more alternatives to American goods/services outside of Europe
Yeah but the point of "Buy European" isn't just anti-American. It's to you know...Buy European. You defeat the purpose when you go buy something built in Asia.
True the point of this community is to buy European. I'm in Europe (the UK) so I like the idea of buying European.
OP's post talked about boycotting the USA though, so I'm just saying that there are more options as well as European ones if you want to boycott the USA.
Also the countries I mentioned have relatively similar values to Europe.
It's a shame it needed someone like Trump to actually get European alternatives more attention. They needed attention way before Trump.
Also the food and drinks alternatives are a bit odd. Many brands on the European side I don't recognize, probably because they're pretty local to whoever made this list.
Fastmail is a good non US alternative. Based in Australia.
For those that don’t know about Proton.
Proton CEO said “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.”
The company then doubled down on a Reddit post which it eventually deleted.
You have to be blind or a liar to look at what the Republicans have done in the last 10 years and think they pro little guy.
Despite claiming political neutrality, Proton later issued a statement reiterating its support for stronger antitrust measures, particularly against Big Tech. The company noted that regardless of broader political views on the Republican platform, the appointment of Gail Slater as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Donald Trump was a positive step.
So they don’t care how bad the government is as long as it helps them. So not a Nazi but willing to support them if they can get something out of it. Furthermore it is also not true. The US under Trump has threatened Europe multiple times to defend big Tech.
Proton further argued that major tech companies were attempting to align with Trump because his administration posed an “unprecedented challenge to their monopolistic dominance.” This statement only fueled concerns that Proton was leaning politically despite its claims of neutrality.
They don’t seem to understand what politically neutral is. Also if you wanted a president that went after big tech, Biden did way more than Trump:
Under President Biden, the DOJ and FTC have taken a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement.
The Justice Department filed another suit against Google over its dominance in the advertising technology space and sued Apple for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone market.
Biden’s FTC also sued Amazon for antitrust violations, accusing the e-commerce giant of engaging in anticompetitive behavior to dominate the online retail space.
Proton also lied about logging user data.
In 2021, Proton Mail admitted to handing over a user’s IP address to Swiss authorities following a request from French law enforcement via Europol. This revelation contradicted Proton’s earlier claims that it did not log user data.
You seem to simply disagree with him on "going after big tech" when it comes to antitrust. The guy also mentioned why he thinks democrats are a lost cause in the antitrust space.
So they don’t care how bad the government is as long as it helps them
This is a complete non sequitur from the previous paragraph. The reasonable conclusion is that they (or better, HE) don't care if it's a republican or a Democrat pushing for antitrust enforcement. They didn't endorse the government, they didn't campaign for them, they praised that pick, and if it is a good pick why shouldn't them? Everyone benefits from big tech monopolies being broken up.
Now, we might disagree with his opinion, I personally think it was naive and overly optimistic, but having an opinion like that is completely legitimate.
Proton also lied about logging user data.
False.
What they did was 100% expected by any company. They have been forced to log that particular user data, because complying with laws is a requirement to run a business. Not logging data is not a control that cannot be implemented in a way that can't be reverted. They had to be forced to log user data because they didn't, which proves exactly the opposite of what you are claiming.
If you want to take it up with someone here, take it up with governments who abuse antiterrorism laws. Any company in any jurisdiction could be forced to do the same.
Same for the case where they handed out the recovery email address of that user. 100% expected and a great proof of how little data they have about users.
We can argue about the nuances of the reasoning; but the crux of the matter is that the CEO posted a statement that praised Trump and criticized the Democrats; and the followed up with an "official Proton position" which doubled down - again praising the Republican party and criticizing the Democrats.
This cannot be described as 'politically neutral', regardless of what reasoning or opinions underpin it.
They have never been politically neutral when it comes to antitrust and privacy (well, antitrust has direct implication for privacy). They spell that out as the exception quite clearly, an thankfully they are not.
In this context, praising Trump and/or criticizing democrats in this context is A-okay for me. I did not have a problem even with that being their official position, TBH, but I can agree that it was a poor decision.
I am still waiting for anyone to give actual evidence for that. Stating on twitter that the Democrats were unwilling to even listen to their concerns, while the Republicans were willing to meet, seems to be quite far from bootlicking imo.
The whole outrage seemed to be engineered in the same way there were people claiming Proton would be a CIA assets, but never providing any lead, not even some obscure untrustworthy website making such a claim.
Looks like the company officially recinded the statement Andy Yen made. Posted text to avoid Xitter link
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
We want to clarify that Proton's CEO did not endorse Trump, only the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. For further information, you can also see this Reddit thread that contains an analysis of why many believe that Proton and our CEO are not supporting any party:
Proton is not controlled by any single person, but by the non profit Proton Foundation which has neutrality in its governing principles and we remain committed to the neutrality principle. The Proton Foundation is also legally obligated in its charter to defend freedom and democracy.
:::
It's pretty much just Bing and Google no matter what engine you use nowadays. Well, unless you go with Yandex or chinese search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines - Mojeek is a meta-search engine, but it also crawls the internet itself, which makes it very interesting.. I might give it a go.
Imo the best European (specifically German) made OS is OpenSUSE. Its Sway spin is the definition of functionality above form, nearly all tools are designed with that in mind and it comes with good defaults out of the box. Granted it also looks amazing if not a tad dated, the unified design and color language however is nice even if that color is green. Also consider donating to the FSFE rather than the FSF.
OpenSuse is kind of a shit show, not to mention the weirdness with the trademark/pseudo-association it has with Suse. I've been running OpenSuse on a small production server for some years after migrating to it from CentOS. It's mostly fine, but I've had to deal with some sloppy updates breaking things, and have had to completely disable my automatic nightly backup&updates job because of an bug with the OS that no one seems to have solved yet (there's a discussion about it from a while back on their forums with multiple reports, but no resolution) . I'll be switching to Rocky or Alma next time I do major maintenance on it.
Also, unlike most distros, OpenSuse shipped the xzutils backdoor to their users. They quickly retracted it, but still. Not even Fedora did that!
EDIT: To quickly add, I don't think OpenSuse is terrible by any means, but the bar for Linux distros is quite high these days.
Tumbleweed (a rolling release) is so stable I switched my friends & family to it prob 5+ years ago, now I only have to do any maintenance when switching hardware.
Shop at Aldi or Lidl (German). Although Asda isn't owned by Walmart any more, so I think British supermarkets are all pretty British again, apart from Safeway but I haven't seen one of those in a long time.
The company's product runs on Amazon's AWS cloud, and similar products are in development for Microsoft Azure and Google's GCP environment.[2]
Aside from running deeply integrated into US cloud providers, it is reasonable to assume for Israeli cybersecurity companies that they have links to Israeli and US intelligence. And the CEO Noam Erez is advertised as "he spent 25 years with the Israeli intelligence community" https://xmcyber.com/team/noam-erez/
I am becoming convinced I should migrate my private mail to another service hosted within the EU. But my god do I not want to deal with migrating mail.
You just create a new address (or point your existing one to the new provider) and slowly migrate
I degoogled my crap 5-6 years ago and I still have a handful of sites sending mail to my @gmail address because they don’t allow changing your address at all 😆
I've barely seen any of the drink alternatives (unfortunately).
Besides Redbull, which I don't drink, I've seen fritz cola, but that's usually at 2-2,5x the price of a coca cola. As an alternative that really stings.
the drink alternatives feel rather german-centric lmao, like fritz seriously?
the only one i know as a more widespread brand is zingo and red bull. And really, we're talking about 3 categories of drink here: cola, orange, and caffeine. I would be very surprised if there aren't at least 3 generic brands available per country that taste perfectly okay and are cheap as fuck to boot.
Hahaha for some reason the generic sodas from Aldi/Lidl/... Slipped my mind. Most of them don't taste that great though. Guess it's a good excuse to just drink more water ( and add a bit of lemon juice or other slices of fruit for flavour ).
I'd really like to get rid of Google Maps, but the alternatives I've tried failed to make a good replacement.
I use the bus / tram / metro more than anything, and occasionally drive long distances.
I'm okay with having two different apps for driving and public transport.
cool, i was not aware of that application. might be worth looking into. it feels like it wold need a pretty large critical mass to make real time traffic useful though.
AFAIK they sell location libraries and maps, the app is just an "example" of how to consume their real product, and is probably used to also collect anonymized realtime data.
Love to see Europeans jumping on board as well. At some point Americans only customers will be Russia and North Korea if Trumps administration keeps bullying and alienating countries like this.
+1 for MUBI , it is a streaming service with curated high quality cinema. And they have a very accesible plan . They have a notebook or magazine they deliver every few months that is priceless. I have some volumes. For Cinema lovers obviously .
I wanted to subscribe, I think they had a promotion for 1$ for a few months. I looked into their privacy policy and I was not really happy, data collected for personalized advertising etc.
It was unfortunate, but I would like something to see more niche movies.
I've been using it for about a year now and it's quite capable. Picture search is good and the layout is quite nice.
There have been some fringe topics (mostly programming related) where I needed to resort back to Google because the results were just not good enough. Also it has no Maps equivalent (anymore) which sucks when you want to search for places.
Funny how most of the list is pretty one sided with all of the famous brands on the same side (for that item), but half of the items have the famous brands in America and half have it on the European side.
He is the Antichrist, singlehandedly causes global warming and I believe he might also have played a role in the spread of the plague in Europe in the 1300.
Like seriously, accusations of this caliber should be supported by solid evidence. If you can't bother even reading the context of what all the noise was about, don't go around commenting on the topic?
I see this happen quite a lot in the Fediverse. It's generally a progressive place, aims to be a safe space, but ultimately I see that there is a tendency to pressure people in matching an aesthetic, rather than actually think and discuss things rationally.
So now Proton has been labeled by someone and many people don't want to go against this flow, because that is going against the aesthetic of fighting Trump/nazis/whatever, which makes you in turn a pro-Trump/MAGA/nazi, whatever. Nevermind that there is plenty of space to debate that attribution on the first place.
Comparing Andy Yen to big tech CEOs like the article does is really nonsensical though. 1 made a really stupid statement about Republicans (I don't think that makes him a pro-Trump clown, let alone a Russian Nazi), the others literally backed him with million dollar donations, changed policies and stood on the podium with Trump.
This list seems a bit flawed, for instance on the travel line, Trivago is owned by Expedia in the US and Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam.
Also including BlueSky seems a little odd given the intent
Re Bluesky I did some "I am not a lawyer" digging.
Bluesky is owned by "Bluesky Social PBC", a Public Benefit Company registered in Delaware.
Generally speaking it means when decisions about the company are made, they must take into account how that decision benefits their stated public value. I struggled to find the specific value wording, but let's assume it's a reasonable one for the time being.
Unfortunately being a PBC is basically voluntary, especially when you're still a private company. You can become a non-PBC with a simple board vote. (A public company would require a stockholder vote.)
Bluesky's board consists of four members, one of which is Bain Capital, aka the company funding Bluesky.
So Bluesky is absolutely a better alternative to Twitter. If everyone left Twitter and moved to Bluesky that would be a monumental improvement.
However Bluesky is not a non-profit company, as the above graphic states.
bluesky is just Xlite.
This
Huh, Bain is Romney's group. Didn't know they were involved there.
Trivago isn't completely "owned" by Expedia, but Expedia does own a majority of the company stock. Its headquarters are in Germany, and 100% of its employees are there.
Booking.com is 100% owned by Priceline, a US company. They also have a long string of international controversies.
Bluesky has to be running a massive propaganda push. I see so many lies saying they are decentralized or like here saying they are a non-profit.
This shit is evil. Whoever is making these fliers is not being honest.
It’s more important to get people off twitter. Mastodon just doesn’t have the right pull right now.
Regardless, flat-out lying and saying that Bluesky is non-profit is a bad look.
I agree.
Taking sides in a
warkerfuffle between billionaires that don't care about you is just weird nonsense.Go as fossy as possible and support your devs directly.
Shout-out to Sharkey! We're young, hip and have reactions other than "heart". Plus, we can talk to Mastodon instances and it all just works. Ever thought what your social network needed was unlockable achievements? We've got that, too!
You made me look up Sharkey and create a Sharkey account, just letting you know you had some impact.
uis sick, easy to run an instance with yunohost too, I always wanted discord like emojis for twitter posts
Awesome! I hope you enjoy it :)
Neat - any public instances accepting registrations?
btw lil formatting quirk on Safari iOS (maybe just appropriate punishment 😉) if y’all know who has edit access
There's some: https://sharkey.fediverse.observer/list . The "active users" listed on that chart is inaccurate, though.
I'll see if I can figure out who can fix that formatting quirk (probably not me, also am afk/at a convention this weekend 😊).
It's basically filling the void the Xitter transition created. Either way, we got a massive boost in the decentralised space.
This is misinformation. BlueSky is not a non profit. It is a public benefit company. The shareholders still expect profit.
The shareholders expect growth and therefore increase in the value of their investment, public benefit companies are however under no obligation to their shareholders to pass on profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. It's definitely not a non-profit either though, it's a different structure.
Plenty of "regular" for profit companies focus on increasing share value by investing profits back into the company instead of paying out dividends. That doesn't really mean anything.
Edit: I see what you mean based on what I said. They expect a return on investment is a better way to phrase it.
And for software like Microsoft and Adobe:
Some more recommendations
I don't know Ardour but these are actually solid!
Look, I love Audacity which is an awesome audio editor but it is absolutely not an alternative to Logic or Fl, which are DAWs.
FreeCAD is a start, but nowhere as good as AutoCAD, unfortunately. I haven't tried GIMP's v3.0 version yet, but 2.x is terrible to use. Depending on what you need to do, Krita would be a better alternative.
The best alternative to commercial CAD systems is commercial CAD systems if you know what I mean. That said, FreeCAD is the only option if you want to run on Linux. Inventor, Solidworks, AutoCAD, etc, are all borked even in wine.
I've never really tried it, but onshape is browser based.
I never really cared for onshape/simscale or fusion. Maybe I am just oldschool but the whole browser based thing didn't sit right with me for CAD stuff.
I've worked professionally with a lot of CAD systems in the past (Caria, Solidworks, Siemens NX, Creo ...) and Onshape feels so refreshing compared to all of these "old school" CAD systems.
The git like system to manage to manage version for example works extremely well, performance wise it can be used on a potato and being browser based it can be used on Linux.
The design process is extremely smooth and intuitive.
My only problem with it is that unfortunately all the data is cloud based and it requires a constant internet connection but so far I have not found a worthy alternative.
Yeah, the versioning and operations history functions a similar to an always refreshing l pdm suite imo which can be handy but I never found it to be all that much better for my needs. I didn't play with the version merging functions much though. The only via internet aspect was a dealbreaker for me from a functional and security perspective.
Word alternative: I started trying out OnlyOffice, based in Latvia. So far it seems decent. Definitely doesn't look as dated as Open- and LibreOffice.
Logic, FL Studio alternative: Audacity is in my opinion not a serious alternative. If you want simple voice overs, sure, but otherwise no. I'd recommend Reaper instead. Not open source, but there aren't many DAWs that are (maybe Ardour, but I don't have experience with it ). Reaper is really open as far as proprietary DAWs go.
There are so many issues with this, lots of wrong information, recommendations of stuff that's bad and really shouldn't be recommended and stuff that really should be there isn't. Please don't share it this further, it's absolutely shit.
"Perfect is the enemy of good. Please accept this slop."
TBF, it says "European", not "good".
"Oh no this is wrong"... proceeds to shit on it, not provide a single example or correction
BlueSky is not owned by a non profit. First row.
I'm not in it but I have been told it's almost impossible to control the narrative as Muskrat does on Twitter
It is held by a benefit corporation which means they have to, at least pretend, to bring some societal benefit
While AT Protocol is sort of federated in a sense, no one really runs aggregators (which serves half of the role an instance does in ActivityPub) besides BlueSky themselves, so they can still control it if they wanted to.
Also, "normal" for profit companies can also pretend to want to bring good to the world. It's misinformation because public benefit companies are allowed to collect a profit (post says non profit).
I still believe BlueSky is world's better than Twitter! But it's important to be honest about it.
Totally fair
Home to Go is just a search engine for VRBO, which is a US company owned by Expedia. It is not a replacement for Airbnb, nor does it stop supporting US companies.
Good to know. See? Some actual actionable information
So whats a better list, or what should be removed?
Pretty ironic that the website that created this, buy-european-made.eu, is actually promoting their Reddit community. They should really switch to an EU-hosted Lemmy instance, and also join Mastodon, just like european-alternatives.eu: @[email protected]
Also: avoid AKG, consider Austrian Audio.
AKG is a popular brand in professional music and audiophile circles. It was bought by Samsung in 2016, who promptly drove the company into the ground, closed their Austrian facilities, and moved headquarters to America and production to SE-Asia. AKG's name is now used for brand recognition on Samsung's generic big tech garbage. Yes, I'm still salty about it.
Austrian Audio was founded by the actual engineers who worked at AKG, currently owned by a Danish audio tech company. They produce high-end professional headphones.
Sennheiser and beyerdynamic are also big competitors in the hi-fi market. Both are German.
Proton’s CEO supports Trump despite being an EU based company:
https://tildes.net/~society/1ldg/proton_ceo_tweets_support_for_donald_trumps_department_of_justice_pick_and_the_us_republican_party
Proton is a Swiss company, not EU
Sure, but it’s listed in the image on services.
Europe != E.U.
Europe is a continent, EU is the European Union which has 27 member countries in Europe that are not Switzerland.
Yes, absolutely. Again, not the point of my comment which is the chart the OP posted has some questionable suggestions if you’re picking and choosing businesses based on their political support (which I fully support people doing)
They support their pockets
Hello and welcome to the point!
How can you make appliances list without Miele?
If you are in the market for a vacuum cleaner do yourself a favor, go more expensive and get a Miele, especially if you have some carpets, most vacuums can do a job on hard floors, but damn the difference of vacuuming carpets either a cheap vacuum vs my Miele is night and day.
(Don't know about the rest of their products, but they are german and a family owned business)
Every student home I've lived in had Miele appliances, indestructible like Nokia phones.
True.
But also not really the usual student budget.
I think they mean "rentals for students"
Yes, I understood as such.
It's balancing between cheap & cheap to replace vs actually good and lasting.
Their washing machines are beasts. In a good way.
Also at least in the UK the best KitchenAid alternative has got to be Kenwood. Love my mixer.
Completely missing are power tools and guns. So please buy Bosch, Festool, Hilti, H&K, Cz., Glock, FN.
I missed the "and guns" part of your first sentence, which made me think, "Whoa, I gotta get me a Glock power drill."
Good to know about Bosch, Festool, and Hilti, thanks for the info. My ancient Dewalt drill just started smoking, so I now know where to look.
If you want something really good get Makita from Japan. Bosch has two quality levels green is meh to good, blue is very good.
Thanks! I'm just a hapless homeowner who occasionally roleplays being handy enough to fix things (though my last shelving unit for my basement came out remarkably level, surprisingly).
(I had actually been hoping to repair the Dewalt, as it's a hand-me-down from my dad (fuck cancer), but I'm pretty sure it'd be a lost cause (the drill is at least 20 years old, probably older, I'm pretty sure I remember my dad using it when I was a kid).)
I'm still using my deceased dad's orange drill from the 1970s made by Black+Decker.
Fuck cancer, I concur.
Fun fact, Hilti, a Liechtenstein company, has 34000 employees. The country itself has 40000 citizens.
Yes, they produce mostly abroad afaik. Another somewhat known company from Liechtenstein is cable maker Neutrik. If you've even been in a pro audio or broadcasting studio or a scientific lab, you probably have used their cables.
Avoid American gun companies like Sig Sauer, and support Swiss and EU gun companies like Sig Sauer
All kidding aside also worth mentioning are Beretta, Benelli, and Steyr
Consider buying Solovairs instead of Dr martens. They're basically the same, the main difference is that they are made in the UK in a factory that used to make Dr martens before they delocalized their production to Asia
When my Solovair became too worn to wear, they sent me replacement soles, like, the whole bottom half of the shoe, and put me in touch with their repair guy to have them put on. Great service through and through, and lovely people!
This list has some issues, Booking.com is Dutch and Philips' Consumer division is just a name that whitelabels other companies products and is owned by a Chinese investment company.
Booking.com is owned by an American company though
Also, Ecosia and Qwant rely on Bing for their search results I believe
or Google, but they are working together on their own search engine from what I heard
Booking is 100% owned by Priceline (renamed Booking Holdings). They only paid $113M for the company in 2005. That's a damn steal.
The other travel "alternatives" are either owned by Expedia, majority stock holders by Expedia, or just act as a front end search for Expedia and VRBO. It's honestly ridiculous.
Interesting, didn't know this. Thanks for pointing it out.
You do know that RedBull is owned by a right-wing extremist in Salzburg who tries to undermine Austrian democracy with Servus TV the same way Murdoch and Springer do in Germany and elsewhere?
You can add Miele to the appliances list.
Had a washing machine that has lasted decades from them. Also upvote because weebl
The right hand column for “Drinks” can just be tap water barring a few exceptions water in Europe is clean and safe as well as being delicious in some countries!
DON'T SPREAD STUPID SH*** LIKE THAT.
What a BS honestly, I am fully anti Trump but this does not help at all. Why? Some examples:
It still helps because you are buying european which is better for europe also you called every single company in the list fascist with this logic, a lot of them arent, idk what redbull did tho.
It is german but pretty sure its sold by coca cola.
My response to you and the OP is simple: you don't counter faschist stupidity with stupidity, but with nuance. That's the difference between them and us, not where you produce or buy.
But its not just about fascism. If you actually want to counter fascism you dont just go "im not gonna buy this product", you actually have to take action. Anyone thinking a few people not buying a product will change the situation is a bit too optimistic. Even if you stop one of em another one pops up. You have to take action to change the system. But circling back yo buying european its still a pretty good thing overall so that europe can have a stronger economy. Anyone opposing this is like the people who voted for trump becsuse kamala wasnt any better. She was better and she couldve been even better if you voted for her and then protested to make her do what you want.
A large social movement to reduce imports from a given country and support local manufacturing can indeed still be of great benefit and can materially hinder the success of fascism though.
It doesn't help because most of those "euro" options are publicly traded on American stock markets where the fascists make their money lol. You booked on trivago instead of some other place great now that stock went up and the well invested musks of the world just made some money anyway. Money they will use to influence elections all over the world.
Spond?
Social media? Sports management is social media????
Social media gets used by a lot of amateur sports teams, especially ones where the players are kids. There's a lot of parent communication that goes through facebook, instagram, etc.
I would be cautious to trust an American company just because they are non-profit. We know that if they get sufficiently big they can just transition into being for profit (see OpenAi), chances are regulations regarding this won't become stronger later.
Signal being open source of course helps, but it's usually the ecosystem that people grow to rely on that keeps them in place, not the technology. Just look at how big Reddit is compared to Lemmy for a good example of that. If signal was federal that would be quite different since jumping ship would be easy.
It's not just a matter of being a no profit, it's also a matter of business incentives and target customers. Signal survives with donations and specifically targets the more privacy -conscious segment of the general population. They don't have a business model without the current setup, as the moment they advertise, sell data or do anything that violates the implicit contract with customers, their customer base disappears.
OpenAI on the other hand was "open" until it came up with a product, then it immediately stopped being so. But how many people from their customer base care about openness?
For signal also privacy is a core feature, for openAI being "open" was not.
I think the situation is very different, and while we should always check and never trust for free, we need to acknowledge the fundamental structural differences.
As a American, I really do love Electrolux appliances.
Also, for headphones, beyer dynamic. Damn they make a great set of cans.
Tbf, most great headphone makers are European
Chifi is definitely also some good stuff. I love my Moondrop Aria IEMs. But I also love my Sennheiser, Beyer and Meze cans.
A shout out to Austrian Audio (former AKG engineers), Focal, and Meze. Some of the best high-end audio companies for headphones, not that beyer is bad, I just don't personally enjoy their sound signature.
Also on the amp side of things Analogvibes is a German company producing diy tube compressors and equalizer kits for music production. On the pricey side for sure but the quality cannot be beat, they sound and feel absolutely beautiful.
Honestly a lot of this is just good advice in general, even speaking as an American.
Also, oof that General Motors apparently isn't important enough to be worth avoiding (and that
ChryslerStellantis no longer counts as American).this flyer is full of lies. It was made by someone who doesn't understand globalism or what a non-profit is.
GM sold their european division to PSA in 2017, which is now part of Stellantis.
Maybe they don’t have a huge physical presence in Europe like ford does
LOL! On one hand, sure, you could say that: the American companies GM and Chrysler don't have a presence in Europe.
But really what happened is more that they have such a big presence in Europe that they got bought out and are now European themselves. I had already known Fiat bought Chrysler to form FCA, but TIL while researching this response that GM Europe (so just the European subsidiary, not the whole thing) got bought out by PSA Peugeot-Citroen. Then PSA and FCA merged to form Stellantis. So, yeah: Chrysler and GM (in Europe) are not only fully-European companies instead of American-owned ones, they're the same European company. 🪦
Yea that was probably better phrased a real question, but thank yo for the clarification
Sad Element/Matrix noises q.q
Right! Tedomum.net is hosted in France 🥖
First time i see this sub on the frontpage.
You should boycott evil corporations regardless of where they are from, don't make it a nationalistic thing, some of the alternative suggested here are as much bad as their usa counterpart. You are not achieving shit by switching from nike to adidas...
The last line on the document says "Perfect is the enemy of good. Every little bit counts."
It's pretty apt. To deal with this particular issue it makes sense to divest from one country to another regardless of brands. Divesting from mega corporations is another issue entirely and beyond the scope of this boycott.
What does achieve switching from USA mega corporations to EU mega corporations? Ditch corporations for good and stop eating fast food.
It shows the USA that the people care enough about this specific issue to spend their money elsewhere.
The issue of mega corporations is completely separate of the issue of the USA. It would be best to deal with both, but it's better to deal with one than to do nothing at all.
If you live in sud america you are doing more good buying a pair of handcrafted boots from USA than h&m boots imported from china.
No you see, when the workers are locked in the burning production plant, it matters a lot if they are are murdered for a billionaire who avoids taxes in the EU, as opposed to a billionaire avoiding taxes in the US.
Just a random example from the list: H&M makes their fast fashion in third world countries and has stores all over the world including america.
You can buy from a company where people get 30 days of paid leave, unlimited sick days, and health care.
Of course especially for fashion, production will mostly be somewhere in Asia under dubious conditions.
Afaik its about decreasing reliance on American goods and services due to their tarrifs on the EU, those products and services may not be available in the future so its better to find solutions now then scramble later
Got me an AMD Tuxedo laptop and some Raspberry Pi's, and my gaming desktop is all AMD too. Fuck Intel and NVidia.
I was avoiding everything made in the States before it was cool
Isn't AMD also from the States?
I was about to say, pretty sure AMD is more in the states than Nvidia at this point. Either way, both are fabbed in Taiwan. Intel is the only one that mostly fabs in the USA.
I mean, it's not like there are non-US alternatives for those
Yeah I agree, but OP's message seemed to imply that (or at least could be misunderstood that way).
Americans probably should have boycotted American products back when Europe put consumer data safeguards in and the US government refused to. Our food safety, our work life, our online data, our health care-- all driven by profit motive in the US but protected as rights in Europe.
These brands all still follow all those rules when they operate in Europe, they just don't bother on the other side. Like we get snicker bars and whatever, but they're just slightly healthier or at least don't contain stuff that's actively bad for you, but they're still shit if that's all you eat. The usual example is Fanta where the difference is really stark.
Libertarian ideas are quite popular in the US; we are waiting for the invisible hand of the market to save us. Learned helplessness at its best.
I am American but don't want to be anymore
The snacks section could use a lot of chocolates but then again as European it's hard to find American chocolate: Milka, Ferrero Rocher, Lindt, Tony's Chocolonely, Callier... Just to name a few.
I was surprised to see Toblerone on the American side, apparently they're under an American company nowadays! TIL
Also, Logitech isn't Chinese? Huh, TIL as well
Ritter Sport chocolates is a banger.
Oh that's an amazing one, I really should've thought of that!
Yah, avoid most US chocolate as best as possible. There are some local/regional chocolatiers that are darn good, but likely not going over to Europe.
Oh yeah, local chocolatiers tend to be the best, although also by far the most expensive.
In general, in Europe it's easy to avoid foreign products if you buy local (baker's bread, fisher's fish, greengrocers' vegetables, etc.), but also assuming you earn well.
One note on Bosch and the European car manufacturers: They're funding the Orbán government among others.
More info on this, please
7-Eleven is 100% Japanese since 2005
Boycott 9-Eleven instead.
HMD could be mentioned in electronics, they're Finnish and they make smartphones. The CPUs in some of their phones are from Unisoc who are Chinese; maybe some people would want to know that. In their other phones they use Qualcomm CPUs, and Qualcomm are American.
Also there are more alternatives to American goods/services outside of Europe, e.g. goods/services from places like Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand.
E.g. South Korean cars (Hyundai and Kia) or Taiwanese electronics (Asus, Acer, MSI).
AFAIK you can't make a phone without some Chinese components.
I wonder if that's true, maybe it is. I wonder if Samsung phones have Chinese parts. I think they use Samsung or Qualcomm CPUs, and they're made in Vietnam and India rather than China. Maybe some parts are Chinese, they could well be.
China rules the rare earth market. Pretty much everything that has rare earths (like chips) is connected to China somewhere in the production process.
I see, I didn't know that.
Yeah but the point of "Buy European" isn't just anti-American. It's to you know...Buy European. You defeat the purpose when you go buy something built in Asia.
True the point of this community is to buy European. I'm in Europe (the UK) so I like the idea of buying European.
OP's post talked about boycotting the USA though, so I'm just saying that there are more options as well as European ones if you want to boycott the USA.
Also the countries I mentioned have relatively similar values to Europe.
It's a shame it needed someone like Trump to actually get European alternatives more attention. They needed attention way before Trump.
Also the food and drinks alternatives are a bit odd. Many brands on the European side I don't recognize, probably because they're pretty local to whoever made this list.
Yep, several Nordic food, drink and snacks brands there. The burgers at Max are good but I doubt they'll deliver from Malmö Sweden to Portugal.
The list has it's shortcomings but it's a good start.
L for Proton mention.
CEO is fascist loving boot licker
Edit: company rescinded statement Andy Ten Yen made
Fastmail is a good non US alternative. Based in Australia.
For those that don’t know about Proton. Proton CEO said “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” The company then doubled down on a Reddit post which it eventually deleted.
You have to be blind or a liar to look at what the Republicans have done in the last 10 years and think they pro little guy.
Despite claiming political neutrality, Proton later issued a statement reiterating its support for stronger antitrust measures, particularly against Big Tech. The company noted that regardless of broader political views on the Republican platform, the appointment of Gail Slater as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Donald Trump was a positive step.
So they don’t care how bad the government is as long as it helps them. So not a Nazi but willing to support them if they can get something out of it. Furthermore it is also not true. The US under Trump has threatened Europe multiple times to defend big Tech.
Proton further argued that major tech companies were attempting to align with Trump because his administration posed an “unprecedented challenge to their monopolistic dominance.” This statement only fueled concerns that Proton was leaning politically despite its claims of neutrality.
They don’t seem to understand what politically neutral is. Also if you wanted a president that went after big tech, Biden did way more than Trump:
Under President Biden, the DOJ and FTC have taken a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement.
The Justice Department filed another suit against Google over its dominance in the advertising technology space and sued Apple for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone market.
Biden’s FTC also sued Amazon for antitrust violations, accusing the e-commerce giant of engaging in anticompetitive behavior to dominate the online retail space.
Proton also lied about logging user data.
In 2021, Proton Mail admitted to handing over a user’s IP address to Swiss authorities following a request from French law enforcement via Europol. This revelation contradicted Proton’s earlier claims that it did not log user data.
Yikes that's worse than I thought
You seem to simply disagree with him on "going after big tech" when it comes to antitrust. The guy also mentioned why he thinks democrats are a lost cause in the antitrust space.
This is a complete non sequitur from the previous paragraph. The reasonable conclusion is that they (or better, HE) don't care if it's a republican or a Democrat pushing for antitrust enforcement. They didn't endorse the government, they didn't campaign for them, they praised that pick, and if it is a good pick why shouldn't them? Everyone benefits from big tech monopolies being broken up.
Now, we might disagree with his opinion, I personally think it was naive and overly optimistic, but having an opinion like that is completely legitimate.
False. What they did was 100% expected by any company. They have been forced to log that particular user data, because complying with laws is a requirement to run a business. Not logging data is not a control that cannot be implemented in a way that can't be reverted. They had to be forced to log user data because they didn't, which proves exactly the opposite of what you are claiming.
If you want to take it up with someone here, take it up with governments who abuse antiterrorism laws. Any company in any jurisdiction could be forced to do the same.
Same for the case where they handed out the recovery email address of that user. 100% expected and a great proof of how little data they have about users.
Edit: For completeness here is an article from someone who went through past history (words and actions) for Proton https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
We can argue about the nuances of the reasoning; but the crux of the matter is that the CEO posted a statement that praised Trump and criticized the Democrats; and the followed up with an "official Proton position" which doubled down - again praising the Republican party and criticizing the Democrats.
This cannot be described as 'politically neutral', regardless of what reasoning or opinions underpin it.
They have never been politically neutral when it comes to antitrust and privacy (well, antitrust has direct implication for privacy). They spell that out as the exception quite clearly, an thankfully they are not. In this context, praising Trump and/or criticizing democrats in this context is A-okay for me. I did not have a problem even with that being their official position, TBH, but I can agree that it was a poor decision.
They did similar posts in the past, see https://proton.me/blog/trump-controls-nsa-fbi or even similarly political content like this. Additionally, most of the orgs they donate to are clearly politically aligned.
So I genuinely don't see the problem in them having a clear position on antitrust, even if it happens to praise trump or republicans.
I am still waiting for anyone to give actual evidence for that. Stating on twitter that the Democrats were unwilling to even listen to their concerns, while the Republicans were willing to meet, seems to be quite far from bootlicking imo.
The whole outrage seemed to be engineered in the same way there were people claiming Proton would be a CIA assets, but never providing any lead, not even some obscure untrustworthy website making such a claim.
Looks like the company officially recinded the statement Andy Yen made. Posted text to avoid Xitter link
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler We want to clarify that Proton's CEO did not endorse Trump, only the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. For further information, you can also see this Reddit thread that contains an analysis of why many believe that Proton and our CEO are not supporting any party:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1id5v21/does_proton_really_support_trump)
Proton is not controlled by any single person, but by the non profit Proton Foundation which has neutrality in its governing principles and we remain committed to the neutrality principle. The Proton Foundation is also legally obligated in its charter to defend freedom and democracy. :::
Pretty sure Qwant just uses Bing's index for search
Same goes for Ecosia though both are now creating a European search index.
It's pretty much just Bing and Google no matter what engine you use nowadays. Well, unless you go with Yandex or chinese search engines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_search_engines - Mojeek is a meta-search engine, but it also crawls the internet itself, which makes it very interesting.. I might give it a go.
Mmm... ditch Garmin, strap a raspberry pi + car battery to your arm, & away you go.
Imo the best European (specifically German) made OS is OpenSUSE. Its Sway spin is the definition of functionality above form, nearly all tools are designed with that in mind and it comes with good defaults out of the box. Granted it also looks amazing if not a tad dated, the unified design and color language however is nice even if that color is green. Also consider donating to the FSFE rather than the FSF.
I worked with opensuse back in the day on a collaborative Linux effort. What.a.trip.
Wow I hope it works for you and works well. Me, I've seen behind the curtain.
What's wrong? I'm very happy with it
OpenSuse is kind of a shit show, not to mention the weirdness with the trademark/pseudo-association it has with Suse. I've been running OpenSuse on a small production server for some years after migrating to it from CentOS. It's mostly fine, but I've had to deal with some sloppy updates breaking things, and have had to completely disable my automatic nightly backup&updates job because of an bug with the OS that no one seems to have solved yet (there's a discussion about it from a while back on their forums with multiple reports, but no resolution) . I'll be switching to Rocky or Alma next time I do major maintenance on it.
Also, unlike most distros, OpenSuse shipped the xzutils backdoor to their users. They quickly retracted it, but still. Not even Fedora did that!
EDIT: To quickly add, I don't think OpenSuse is terrible by any means, but the bar for Linux distros is quite high these days.
Hell yeah, OpenMeSussy is so great!
Tumbleweed (a rolling release) is so stable I switched my friends & family to it prob 5+ years ago, now I only have to do any maintenance when switching hardware.
The buy Canadian Facebook group if you Facebook is full of great alternatives. Yes Facebook sucks the rigid cock of Satan, but it is very useful.
You make facebook sound a lot cooler than it actually is.
Why don't we(lemmy) get to suck the rigid cock of Satan? This is metal as fuck.
I think if you quit you'll find you're fine without it.
It's hard because all my old Livejournal friends are on there.
Shop at Aldi or Lidl (German). Although Asda isn't owned by Walmart any more, so I think British supermarkets are all pretty British again, apart from Safeway but I haven't seen one of those in a long time.
why not just tell people to shop local? do other countries just not have domestic chains anymore?
i know switzerland has coop, and last i checked there's a who series of cooperative grocery stores throughout europe..
I hate to break this to you in a "you're getting old" way, but Safeways disappeared literally 20 years ago. They were bought out by Morrisons.
Morrisons, while we're on the subject, is owned by an American private equity group.
Luckily, I am perfectly aware I'm old, so this hasn't come as a shock.
Lidl and Kaufland should be avoided.
https://gruppe.schwarz/en/press/archive/2021/schwarz-group-acquires-israeli-hybrid-cloud-cybersecurity-innovator-xm-cyber
From the Hebrew Wikipedia article:
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%90%D7%A7%D7%A1_%D7%90%D7%9D_%D7%A1%D7%99%D7%99%D7%91%D7%A8
Aside from running deeply integrated into US cloud providers, it is reasonable to assume for Israeli cybersecurity companies that they have links to Israeli and US intelligence. And the CEO Noam Erez is advertised as "he spent 25 years with the Israeli intelligence community" https://xmcyber.com/team/noam-erez/
So buying at Lidl helps Trump and Netanyahu.
Blimey. Aldi it is.
Don't forget A.G. Barr for drinks, Iron Bru, Rubicon
For messaging: Element on Matrix (decentralized)
I like Fluffy Chat more with the account switching.
the fluffychat website literally says it's a matrix client lol
Yeah it’s a third-party app.
Is any 7-11 still US? I thought 7&I holdings here in Japan bought it all.
Parent company is Seven-Eleven Japan Co., Ltd. But still run with headquarters in Texas and US CEO and president.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Eleven
Thank you - from (sadly) an American
Check out my stack! Any suggestions for alternatives?
https://codeberg.org/noverby/noverby#services
Looks really nice!
Though Lemmy.world is Dutch and I would suggest Qobuz as a better alternative to Spotify.
Thanks for info! Lemmy.world is updated. Why is Qobuz a better alternative to Spotify?
Spotify has paid $100m to Joe Rogan and regularly does tax-evasion.
Letterboxd is from New Zealand!
Whoops, it is fixed now
What's your experience with running /e/OS/ with banking apps and things like that? I've been considering a degoogled Android phone like Fairphone
I live in the USA and I will buy foreign as much as possible. Until we make it illegal most likely
streaming: the right side, most of those are country specific.
For clothing id probably recommend thrifting. But I love this list.
I am becoming convinced I should migrate my private mail to another service hosted within the EU. But my god do I not want to deal with migrating mail.
It’s a process.
You just create a new address (or point your existing one to the new provider) and slowly migrate
I degoogled my crap 5-6 years ago and I still have a handful of sites sending mail to my @gmail address because they don’t allow changing your address at all 😆
I've barely seen any of the drink alternatives (unfortunately).
Besides Redbull, which I don't drink, I've seen fritz cola, but that's usually at 2-2,5x the price of a coca cola. As an alternative that really stings.
the drink alternatives feel rather german-centric lmao, like fritz seriously?
the only one i know as a more widespread brand is zingo and red bull. And really, we're talking about 3 categories of drink here: cola, orange, and caffeine. I would be very surprised if there aren't at least 3 generic brands available per country that taste perfectly okay and are cheap as fuck to boot.
Hahaha for some reason the generic sodas from Aldi/Lidl/... Slipped my mind. Most of them don't taste that great though. Guess it's a good excuse to just drink more water ( and add a bit of lemon juice or other slices of fruit for flavour ).
Is Fanta made mainly for the European market? Like nobody in the US even knows what that is. They used to love it in Germany though.
Omg, I'm boycotting USA ... since like forever, I'm so sorry, it was totally by accident, thots and players, I hope everyone recovers financially.
Tho the steaming one I do a bit ... differently.
(Also just boycott big corpos as much as possible, no matter the region!!)
Delta Chat is a European decentralized instant messenger alternative using existing protocols.
protocols? isn't it just a very quirky email client?
Yea email is a protocol
trying to convince me to switch to BMW. bold move Cotton.
The Big Blinkers will flight you at every step!
(But it's worth it.)
San pellegrino sparkling drinks are really good.
I guess the silver lining is that you'd at least not be supporting a US-based company.
The US kills children with missiles, the Swiss kill children with baby food somehow.
I'd really like to get rid of Google Maps, but the alternatives I've tried failed to make a good replacement.
I use the bus / tram / metro more than anything, and occasionally drive long distances. I'm okay with having two different apps for driving and public transport.
Any suggestions ?
Öffi works really well. See coverage on their site.
Organic maps? Magic earth? Osmand?
Organic maps works really well but it doesn't do realtime traffic right?
you can only do realtime traffic if you have access to global network of gps sensors on the road. there is no way for organic maps to do it.
Magic Earth has realtime traffic in it. Or close to. Use it to contribute. I keep it on when I'm driving even if I don't need it for navigation.
cool, i was not aware of that application. might be worth looking into. it feels like it wold need a pretty large critical mass to make real time traffic useful though.
also, how do they make money?
AFAIK they sell location libraries and maps, the app is just an "example" of how to consume their real product, and is probably used to also collect anonymized realtime data.
See https://www.magiclane.com/web
...ah.
For that you need Magic Earth.
Where is that available? Is it a standalone app or an addon/plugin?
https://www.magicearth.com/
It's an app.
Somehow I don't use/buy any of these? Like from either side of the chart... I guess I'm doing my part?
JPEG over WEBP
I'll just buy using temu or AliExpress. European brands are too expensive in my third world country
Love to see Europeans jumping on board as well. At some point Americans only customers will be Russia and North Korea if Trumps administration keeps bullying and alienating countries like this.
+1 for MUBI , it is a streaming service with curated high quality cinema. And they have a very accesible plan . They have a notebook or magazine they deliver every few months that is priceless. I have some volumes. For Cinema lovers obviously .
I wanted to subscribe, I think they had a promotion for 1$ for a few months. I looked into their privacy policy and I was not really happy, data collected for personalized advertising etc.
It was unfortunate, but I would like something to see more niche movies.
You know nowadays how it is.
Delta Chat might also be worth mentioning/adding. Haven’t used it extensively but the feature set is promising.
This seems to have been made by a Swede.
what do you mean sibylla (being named after a member of the royal family in sweden) isn't an international brand??
As well as Max Burgers. I'm curious how well all the scandinavian streaming services work in various places abroad.
From clothing down on the right column, never seen any of these available for sale here in the midwest
If I had to guess, the intended audience is Europeans.
They do not sell adidas in the midwest?
This works a bit for Canada too.
Damn, I wish I had MAX were I live. I was in Sweden last summer and my SO didn't let me go to MAX 😭
Anyone know if Qwant's search engine is pretty capable? I would like to ditch Google, but it's hard b/c it has the best search results
I've been using it for about a year now and it's quite capable. Picture search is good and the layout is quite nice.
There have been some fringe topics (mostly programming related) where I needed to resort back to Google because the results were just not good enough. Also it has no Maps equivalent (anymore) which sucks when you want to search for places.
Just tried it, it has very similar results as Bing.
Food drink and clothing I was never buying either side anyway.
Recently got some new plain cotton t-shirts though. £2.50 each at Tesco so I got 8. Should just about last me to 2030.
love to see bespoke weathered text instead of a font
Blue sky is an American non-profit?
Funny how most of the list is pretty one sided with all of the famous brands on the same side (for that item), but half of the items have the famous brands in America and half have it on the European side.
Mistral le Chat is an idiot, sadly. I’d love an alternative to OpenAI, but that isn’t it.
You will never avoid Coke. Just admit your impending failure.
OK, but... What is the fault of the rest of the people in the USA?
another propaganda attempt to disband the Europeans …
Isn’t the proton guy like a Russian Nazi or something?
No.
He is the Antichrist, singlehandedly causes global warming and I believe he might also have played a role in the spread of the plague in Europe in the 1300.
Like seriously, accusations of this caliber should be supported by solid evidence. If you can't bother even reading the context of what all the noise was about, don't go around commenting on the topic?
educate yourself on the topic before spreading misinformation
Oh look, Andy Yen is a pro-Trump clown. Educate yourself before commenting next time.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
saying that republicans do one thing right is not synonymous to being a pro Trump clown which in turn is not synonymous to being a russian nazi
It is even more ironic considered that Proton donated 20% of their revenue for new users to Ukraine back in 2022. "Russian Nazi" lol
sadly this is what happens when people parrot every sentiment they see online, everyone should try to become more literate
I see this happen quite a lot in the Fediverse. It's generally a progressive place, aims to be a safe space, but ultimately I see that there is a tendency to pressure people in matching an aesthetic, rather than actually think and discuss things rationally. So now Proton has been labeled by someone and many people don't want to go against this flow, because that is going against the aesthetic of fighting Trump/nazis/whatever, which makes you in turn a pro-Trump/MAGA/nazi, whatever. Nevermind that there is plenty of space to debate that attribution on the first place.
Comparing Andy Yen to big tech CEOs like the article does is really nonsensical though. 1 made a really stupid statement about Republicans (I don't think that makes him a pro-Trump clown, let alone a Russian Nazi), the others literally backed him with million dollar donations, changed policies and stood on the podium with Trump.