Version 2 of the European app alternatives. Feel free to share it :)
https://arcanechat.me/ is also European (Germany) and is decentralized, fully OpenSource, free/gratis and registration requires ZERO personal data! Everything is End-to-end encrypted between people, server can’t see any data which is encrypted and stored only temporarily on the server
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
Peertube doesn’t work
PeerTube work just fine.
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…
And they’re all excellent products, too.
True, but FOSS and free alternatives are very good too. I am amazed by Immich for example (Photos) or Organic Maps (Maps), Tuta (Mails) or Bitwarden (Pass). I have cut my ties with Google personnaly and try to get my close ones to follow but they are not always interested even if I propose the service selfhosted for free.
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
Yeah, it reminds me of that software Richard from silicon valley tv show made that was just so overly complicated. I’ve got to say the people who come up with these ideas are very intelligent, but it’s so overly complicated and not user friendly at all.
They are too set on catering to the small minority that cares about the privacy/decentrilisation of it all while a normal user just cares about: Simply creating an account and using the service
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.
Until it’s as easy as Reddit or YouTube then we are not going to meet critical mass. This isn’t being defeatist, this is being realistic.
Yeah these are real problems that need to be addressed, not issues to say “nuh uh” and bury our head in the sand to
Thank you
Edit: this is much more helpful than the website
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. :)
Took this post as motivation to try some out.
Here WeGo: actually pretty intuitive! Better than OSMand and Organic Maps in terms of Car Navigation (actual Voice and not TTS Voice from android) and 3D sounds that you have to get used to but coule make listening to instrucrions in stressfull sitations easier. Also optional: speeding warning ring sound and shield head up-sound effects (yield, stop, train crossing, etc.) Each with a special sound so you might get better prepared for the next yield or stop sign since your NAV app told ya already that one is coming up soon.
Deezer: Well some usability things annoy me. Also some problems with the android tv client…
Bit the flow mode (random shuffle in genres or moods (happy, party, chill…) that also has a toggle if you want the shuffle be based of songs you have in your playlists/liked already or if you want to go on a jurney to find new songs.
Pretty geat so far!
Qwant: well the search results hit good. Dark theme is a lil worse than DDG’s dark theme but thats just preference. Some !bang searches are not available though. DDG has many more listed than Qwant. But we’re getting there!
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.
Edit: PixelFed is Canadian
I thought Canadian?
Canada is in North America, tbf.
No, PixelFed is fully Canadian. It is also open-source, Federated, and the developer is a stand up guy.
It tells more about you. Deezer, Soundcloud, DeepL and Bolt are pretty popular globally.
That doesn’t mean that they are subfunctional though.
Ecosia is a Bing proxy.
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.
They are working on ditching Bing.
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.
Why am I betting bolt probably isn’t going to be a viable ride service option for americans
no its ok
What?
bolt is okay, or what do you mean its not viable for americans? why not?
Because as of Feb 2024, it still hasn’t rolled out to the US
And their availability page seems to correlate that.
Besides, even if it did, it would take years for it to become accessible to people not living in a big city. It took a long time for Lyft rides to even start showing up where I was in a mildly dense suburb. Ride share usage depends on supply, and if there’s no, or a low supply of bolt drivers, there’s going to be little to no usage from customers because “I need to go now, I’ll just get an Uber”
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
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.
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.
A potential alternative then. It’s up to us to foster that potential. If we want to have an alternative to YouTube, we’ll actually have to actively do something to change that.
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/
Everybody should consider donating even €1 to PeerTube and/or Framasoft if they can.
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.com is French …I’d suggest more than recommend but it’s still better than all these peer tube type sites.
Thanks for the suggestion! Added to the database.
Dailymotion ?
Good idea!
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!
