Version 2 of the European app alternatives. Feel free to share it :)
if you’re considering Qobuz, it’s amazing, and if you’re a student it’s quite affordable with their student plan.
unrelated tool, for more technical folks <3
One thing that list shows me is that Google are incredibly good at what they do, and have a finger in almost every pie imaginable.
Google Photos, Google Pass…
I wish there would be some good european LLMs for agentic coding…
searXNG
Ecosia is a Bing proxy.
They are working on ditching Bing.
Aren’t all these alternatives just Google or bing proxies?
Threema isn’t. Anyway, it’s a bad list. It’s reminiscent of Russian “import replacement” lists which nobody takes seriously.
I recently discovered Monocles.eu, they are a privacy respecting email, chat (Matrix?), drive (Nextcloud?), social (Mastodon) and translator platform. I’m still forming my opinion, but they look good. In France, there’s also the Chatons who propose local alternative hosting of many common services, such as Nextcloud, Mastodon, Matrix, Mattermost, VaultWarden, etc.
For mail I use mailo which is french. But I use a lot of other providers like disroot and my own email domain.
I didn’t know Soundcloud was European. Been using them for a while, my only complaints are: lack of ability to report much of anything, lack of moderation, and a system that incentivizes poor quality uploads of popular songs to avoid automated detection.
If you let it autoplay after picking a popular song you might get a list of bangers or you might get sped up trash uploads with an unfortunate high pitch tone that I imagine must have been outside of the uploader’s hearing range. Occasionally it plays some guy reading phonetic scripts like he’s just learning to read for the first time for an hour, but it made it into the list because it’s titled after a beatles song.
SoundCloud might be the single worst music platform out there, and that’s saying a lot given that Spotify exists. The audio quality is awful, everything is expensive and they double and triple dip artists and listeners. Yet despite the exploitative monetisation, they don’t seem to actually make any money and have almost gone bankrupt several times.
I certainly don’t plan to pay them anything, that’s for sure. I’m just out there looking for a stable mix of things I’ve never heard and some nostalgia, but very few and far between platforms do anything except reccomend the same bunch of songs that you’ve heard a thousand times before.
And also something that plays well on a mobile browser.
It’s pretty telling that, as a European, I’ve literally not heard of any of those European alternatives.
Some of these aren’t European so I wouldn’t feel too bad. PixelFed is American, for example.
No, PixelFed is fully Canadian. It is also open-source, Federated, and the developer is a stand up guy.
I thought Canadian?
Canada is in North America, tbf.
It tells more about you. Deezer, Soundcloud, DeepL and Bolt are pretty popular globally.
That doesn’t mean that they are subfunctional though.
Last time I checked ecosia gets it’s search queries from Bing, just a heads up. Other than that I’d say it’s really solid.
There is Mojeek that is based in UK and have an own search index and web crawler. I wouldn’t recommend it. Mojeek.com
Just wait for this https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
Qwant and Swisscows are in the same basket too.
I think Qwant hasn’t been using Bing for awhile now actually
Peertube has this fediverse problem. You google it, go to the webpage and instead of getting a list of promoted videos, you get an explanation of what it is and a manual on how to actually join, starting with „select a pot“. You then get to search the list of pots that all have like 10 viewers and 5gb upload limit. I stopped at this point.
That being said, i really would like an European youtube alternative, but not off the „provide your own hardware“ kind.
Exactly my problem why I’m not really getting into Lemmy either, same with mastodon. The whole decentralization standing in the middle of it all is just annoying.
Also yeah, Peertube did not even look like a competitor at all. Same with Threema with it costing 6 euros to use
Joinpeertube.org doesn’t have the best onboarding, but take a look at the pinned post at !peertube@lemmy.wtf for a few good servers to choose from.
If it has to be explained in a post on another site then it’s guaranteed to lose.
It has already come a long way and will continue to get better and easier; put in the tiny bit of effort required to help it grow.
Defeatism because everything isn’t spoonfed to you and 100% on par with YouTube is actively harmful to the transition away from American products.
Thank you
Edit: this is much more helpful than the website
This is missing Spotify and TomTom unless I am missing something
Thanks for the feedback. It is not supposed to be a complete list. It’s a start. You can find more alternatives in our database: https://buy-european.net/
One more request then! If appreciate it is your not put text everywhere without additional information. For example the AI filler on the browser page is just noise. Is rather only have the list than contract filters:
“”" There are several compelling reasons to opt for European web browsers. These browsers not only prioritize user privacy and data protection but also foster innovation and support local technology ecosystems. “”"
Thanks for the project by the way!
Thanks for the feedback! We decided to go for it as we want to make sure that the database is not specifically designed for tech-savvy people. We want to give basic information to make the move to different solutions accessible and easy to understand for everyone.
Organic Maps ftw.
For maps I’d also like to add Organic Maps, OsmAnd and Magic Earth.
especially Organic Maps, it’s got the most user-friendly UI out of the three
Thank you! We already had Organic Maps in the database but I will add OsmAnd and Magic Earth now.
MagicEarth is the european version of Waze.
Good to know. :)
Isn’t mapy.cz just an OSM wrapper, but proprietary?
