Version 2 of the European app alternatives. Feel free to share it :)
For mail I use mailo which is french. But I use a lot of other providers like disroot and my own email domain.
Ecosia is a Bing proxy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Where’s Signal (or molly if you need foss)? Signal is an non-profit organisation, so I’d say it can hardly be branded ‘from’ anywhere unless you’re talking about servers location but then…
Signal is still an american non-profit. The HQ is in US and everybody in the board if directors is american.
Signal is centralised, and as such the location of the service operator matters a lot.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Calling Peertube a Youtube alternative is just wrong. It is an alternative in theory but it probably doesn’t even have a milionth of the content that Youtube has.
That’s the problem with “the winner takes it all” on the Internet. Which European alternative would you suggest instead?
There is no real YouTube alternative, unfortunately. The content makes a video platform great. No alternative video platform is anywhere close to YouTube in content diversity.
It’s unfortunately a very different situation to most other things. For example you can “simply” convince your circle of friends to use Threema. Try convincing your favorite Youtubers to post on any alternative platform and see how far you get.
I understand - my hope here would be we see „real“ content that is not clickbait optimized as there is no incentive on that
I’m not saying PeerTube is bad, but if I was a regular person that wanted an alternative to YouTube, going to PeerTube would be an annoying experience that will probably turn me off from it. You have to let people come with the appropriate expectations.
YouTube also didn’t have that variety and amount of videos when it started \o/
So? Again, peertube is great and I’m hoping it grows, but sending people ther as a YT alternative right now is just misleading, odyssey is much closer and even then I wouldn’t call it a real alternative yet.
Dailymotion ?
Good idea!
Missing out the big one here - Spotify is also European fyi.
Why don’t we include nestle then?
Just because it is European, doesn’t mean the company is worth a shit dripping down a wall.
Spotify is a shit company. Pays artists by far the lowest in the industry (especially if you take into account their scummy minimums, catches, and terms for smaller musicians), injects shitty AI songs into Spotify-made playlists so they won’t have to pay the artists the little they do, gives “donations” to fascists, and heavily invests in fucking war companies including partnering one who is essentially trying to make “the dark night” tracking machine to pair with AI assassination drones.
(Also side note, have you noticed all of these scummy surveillance companies making their names into very well-known references to pop culture so that all news stories on them are essentially lost to the pop culture void when searching for them? Palantir, helsing, etc…)
Yes, multiple people have pointed this out already and I’ve agreed with them. However I work in the music industry and Spotify is definitely not paying by far the lowest. By sheer volume they’re paying most of the share a song is earning nowadays and even on a per play basis they are fairly similar to their competitors, maybe slightly lower.
We can make the argument that revenue on a per stream basis is much too low in general and I would agree, but then we also have to rethink the entire pricing model.
I told OP this in previous post; Spotify gave money to Trumps’ inauguration. That’s why it was removed.
Shameless plug for Navidrome
Want your music, always available. No ads, no enshitification. Maximum quality, always reliable?
There is only one clear winner for me.
Interesting service! Good if you own a library of music.
“Own”
What are the quotes for? I own the files on my hard drive. I may not have obtained them through traditional means, but I own them.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We learn and iterate. Thanks for the feedback! We still list Spotify in the database but plan to include quality factors in the (probably not so near) future as well to better differentiate between “European address” and “European commitment”.
What the heck is “European commitment”?
Production in EU, Production in Europe, Production outside Europe could be factors for example and is what I referred to as “European commitment” prior. “European address” would be minimum presence in Europe but formally incorporated there.
That’s a fair point.
but also platforms right wingers that had an impact on influencing our election. i get i shouldn’t be the one guiding boycotts of my own nation’s products, i’m just saying spotify has been antihelpful when it comes to the creation of this situation
Yeah I can totally understand that especially in relation to Rogan etc.
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I use Spotify Connect quite extensively to put music onto my radio without it being Bluetooth. Does Deezer have an equivalent?
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As a musician, I don’t like SoundCloud. The free upload limit is way too small, their compression is not great and every time you do anything they try to sell you one of their subscriptions, which also cost way too much imo.
If other musicians didn’t use it as much I would have already thrown it out long ago.
