Signal is based in California, but they’re a nonprofit.
I thought it was odd to see it in an European alternative list.
I don’t personally have issues with nonprofits or FOSS as exceptions to my own personal boycott of US companies, but if anyone is looking for an alternative to Signal, SimpleX is probably the closest analog.
It’s decentralized and funded globally. It’s based in the UK.
Session is good alternative
Nice, I hadn’t heard of that one. For anyone wondering, it’s pretty loose on who owns it, but the nonprofit that keeps things moving forward is based in Australia.
OP writes “instead of their american counterparts”, and then puts signal.
Firefox as well any opensource doesn’t have a country. You can build it and use it. Avoid any centralized service.
The 4 freedoms of software are:
Freedom 0: The Freedom to Run You can use the software for any purpose, without restrictions. Freedom 1: The Freedom to Study and Modify You have access to the source code, allowing you to study how the software works and make changes to suit your needs. Freedom 2: The Freedom to Distribute Copies You can share copies of the software with others, whether for free or at a cost. Freedom 3: The Freedom to Improve and Share Improvements You can modify the software and share your changes with the community, helping others benefit from your improvements.as long as these freedoms are observed it doesn’t matter the country of origin.
Some of these products would not exist without their American counterpart, which directly fuel their existance.
Librewolf is just a hardened version of Firefox. It would not exist without the Firefox team continuing to develop Firefox and to fix its security issues.
Ecosia primarely uses Bing and Startpage uses Google for search results. Both would not exist without the search engines backing them.
I’m not saying these are bad products and I don’t mean to criticiseze. I’m actually a librewolf user myself. I just think it is important to point out that the European label might be deceiving in this instance and might mislead people into thinking they are using something different than they actually are.
It might also not be so important. Perhaps focusing our energy on good open source projects and NGO-backed initiatives is desirable regardless of their origin?
idk food for thought
Ecosia is actively developing their own search index together with Qwant. They are rolling out French and German results this year actually. AFAIK only like Mojeek and like Swisscow have their own search index (as well as Brave which is US based). But their current search results aren’t really that great which is why I will stick to Qwant.
I also don’t fully trust Brave because of their whole crypto involvement but their search engine is pretty good from experience and definitely much better in terms of privacy than google.
I’ve been using Ecosia for over a year now, it serves my purposes well!
Ohh cool I didn’t know that. I’ll take a look myself and test them some more. I’ve recently been using Duckduckgo again since abandoning Kagi
Awesome stuff. Also don’t forget European DNS companies like Quad9.
And Mullvad
Do DNS make any money?
Startpage got bought by System1 in 2019. System1 is an American advertising company. I personally use Qwant for privacy reasons - They’re also in the process of building their own search index together with Ecosia.
Qwant is a disaster. Just go read their Wikipedia page. Gouging public money for essential being an ecosia without sending money to plant trees…
I found qwant pretty terrible
Really At least cutrently i found qwant provides the best search results
Same
Yeah I agree. I went from Google -> Startpage -> Qwant and I’ve been getting pretty good results honestly. Couldn’t be happier. Only thing bugging me now is them, wanting me to install their browser extension when using Firefox but I just blocked that with uBlock
Why?
American telegram? 😂
i know its soviet technology😔
I mean its not American but certainly not private
I switched from chatgpt pro to lechat and have been using lechat for several weeks now.
It’s so bad comparitively that I am considering to just not use AI anymore.
I used chatgpt daily many times and minstral le chat is just… Incapable of understanding contextual things. It has still a long way to go before it can really compete, sadly.
It’s so bad comparitively that I am considering to just not use AI anymore.
This is the way.
i barely use AI anyway, so to me Le Chat is just as good :3
I found this too and looked if there is something I could do to use chatgpt anonymous. I figured that might be better than continuing to use them in cases I expect le chat to be subpar. DuckDuckGo has an interface for this, although i haven’t figured out much ‘better’ of a solution this is. You can go to http://duck.ai/ chat anonymous with:
- GPT-4o mini
- Llama 3.3 70B
- Claude 3 Haiku
- o3-mini
- Mistral Small 3
According to DuckDuckGo (which is also US-based) your chat will not be used as training data. If someone here has more knowledge please provide it because I’m just not sure if this is much better than using ChatGPT directly except that openai doesn’t get to build a user profile of me.
Decent list, but I’d recommend Threema instead of Signal
doesnt that cost money?
It’s a one-time cost, but sadly this will put people off.
ikr, getting people to switch to signal is impossible already. let alone when they need to pay for it
Did’t know HERE we go, seems very good, thanks!
I like it too and do use it, but unlike Foss alternatives they do use your data for commercial purposes, just so you know.
Good to know but at least it’s not google
Yes definitely
EDIT I misunderstood the post, this is what you’re using, not what you’re recommending, sorry about that!
I will still include my original comment below.Still, I use and can recommend XMPP and the provider magicbroccoli.de! Arne the admin is also a swell guy!
Bold move recommending US Signal over European Telegram!
I’d personally trust neither very much; one’s US funded and the other clearly not as secure outside “secret chats”.
But what about Threema? Or a European XMPP provider like the excellent magicbroccoli.de?
Tell me you’re for weed dealers without telling me you’re for weed dealers xD
I was thinking the same, but I’ve not seen anyone seeming like a weed dealer so far. I think it’s just a case of German humour 😋
Bol doesn’t seem to ship to germany :(
no, only to belgium and netherlands unfortunatly :/
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Any good guide on RVX? I see plenty of websites of I search for revanced but I don’t know which one is the official app
i installed revance manager, through there RVX extended and MicroG. log into microg and your pretty much set (from memory)
Arch isn’t european though, it’s canadian.
The Canadian who started it has long since retired from the project. A lot of the current developers live in Germany.
I can highly recommend https://mapy.com/
