Delta Chat is European and is better alternative for messaging apps
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Bluesky absolutely belongs in the left column.
It's not Transparent, Decentralized or Open Source.
It is a centralized social media network exactly like Twitter. The only 'open' part is a protocol that lets you interact with their, private, service.
The fact that it is 'open source' is largely a red herring, if Bluesky decides to no longer support their protocol then it is worthless. It cannot simply be forked and remain useful.
Bluesky is simply engaging in a PR campaign to steal customers from Twitter. It is exactly the same as Twitter in all of the ways that matter. It can be purchased by Musk or manipulated by the existing owner in the same way as Twitter.
Making a Bluesky account is simply trusting a new corporation to not act like a corporation in the future... which is a pretty naive position.
Ecosia is not open source, or decentralized. It is a private search engine based in Germany that provides search results from the major search engines and sells advertisements via Yahoo and Microsoft ad networks. These ad networks are part of Surveillance Capitalism and earn their money primarily by spying on you, collating your data and selling it/using it to place ads.
Stremio is largely a piece of software used to funnel people into paying for monthly for pirate streaming services. It's not getting rid of Netflix or Disney+, it's giving you the option of paying Russian or North Korean supported cybergangs instead of Netflix for access to streaming content.
The real open source alternative is Jellyfin. Then using qBittorrent along with Sonarr and Radarr to self-host your own media server.
The other suggestions are mostly okay with minor gripes.
- They could add GrapheneOS as an Android alternative.
- Linux Mint is not a bad option but 'What Linux Distro should we recommend to new people' is a contentious topic in the community, Mint is fine but there are other options (EndeavourOS is Arch Linux installed with the Calamares graphical installer and some sane options for a desktop PC, btw)
- While Signal isn't 'open source'. It is, for the moment, a secure option that doesn't require a lot of user knowledge to setup. It is a vastly superior choice than using social media for messaging without requiring a lot of technical knowledge on the user's part.
I'm a millennial, so I'm still checking the nightmare that is Facebook here and there, what's the alternative?
Edit: On second look I'm not so sure how good this list really is...
lol… Brave… Come on man.
Yeah, I was gonna say… Recommending Brave isn’t a great look right now. Especially right in the wake of the Brave CEO going off on that unhinged ultra conservative rant.
And Firefox recently had its own controversy, with the removal of their “we promise never to sell your info” section of their ToS. When questioned, they basically responded with “well some jurisdictions define “sell” as “exchanging for money”… We don’t agree with that. But because some jurisdictions do define it that way, we need to remove that section. All we want to do is exchange your info for money. But again, we don’t think that should be considered selling your info.”
Mullvad has a search engine now (Leta)
Fucking brave shows it's ugly head again. The only thing worse than a browser owned by a greedy corpo is a browser that is owned by two greedy corpos, one of which is mostly a crypto scam corpo.
Currently on mobile and hardly working. Can somebody please do an edit removing fakeogtwitter and the homophobecrytofascistbrowser from this list? The send it to op for replacement. Please and thank you. Cheers.
I don’t think BlueSky is a great alternative, it’s still American and also still pretty big tech
I also still don't fully understand if it can be categorized as decentralized.
Don't use Brave. It's got a lot of privacy issues, even compared to the Mozilla foundation. Underneath, it's still Chrome.
Could you clarify some of these issues? I'm a long time brave user and have really enjoyed using it and haven't noticed any issues besides some if their Web 3.0 integrations that you can turn off.
Always happy to find Better options though.
Instead of downvoting you, as is the style on these types of platforms it seems… I’ll actually try to link a few websites. One moment.
EDIT:
Crypto is dumb and bad for the environment
"reward" system, which is not cool
Further issues some have with the browser
And really, it is just YET ANOTHER Chromium browser, which gives Google MORE dominance on the web, which is a really really BAD thing. They are the ones who are trying everything in their power to not only siphon data off of you to sell to shady businesses, but also don't like how we can block ads, which I care the most about, personally. I'm sure there are plenty more people who are way more knowledgeable than I that can explain the domino effect of what happens when a company has total domination in a field, be it technology or otherwise.
EDIT2: Opera (and Opera GX) for those that like it for some reason...
Thank you for the assist with the reply. I'd also like to add some recent comments the CEO has said...
Thanks for actually answering my question. It was a genuine question based on my opinion for what I knew.
Based on those articles, the crypto stuff doesn't necessarily worry me as much as the affiliate highjacking that they were caught doing. I wasn't aware. Honey recently got caught up In a scandle just as bad if not worse (by scale of users).
And yeah, I heard Opera was pretty terrible. I wanna say I heard the developers of themselves opera left and created Vivaldi and Opera is Chinese owned I think? I could be wrong on that.
Either way, thanks.
Of course! I'd rather send links to someone than sit there and just downvote and move on, even if said person ignores every thing I sent. I tried to help!
My go to is this: Is it Chromium? Move on!
I want to see more Gecko and Webkit browsers than yet another freaking Chromium browser!
The Chinese ownership is stated in the "opera is shady as fuck!" link I sent! When you have time, and if you care enough, I'd recommend looking at the myriad reasons why they are both just really bad browsers, even for someone who can ignore the crypto garbage!
Anyway, have a good rest of your day, Jack! :)
Yeah, I'm not exactly thrilled on chrome either but at a certain point I think it comes down to "who's fucking me the least". Which I totally understand it's probably still chrome but I think just like with privacy, there is no sweet spot with browsers. It's all subjective on each person's threshold and what they want/need.
Call me crazy, but an example I've been thinking about is this:
Firefox is great. But with their recent TOS addition a lot of people want to jump ship of which ive seen a lot reference forks of Firefox. If, hypothetically, mozilla followed suit and became the next google, wouldnt a lot of those forks just be getting their updates from upstream (depending on the type)? And either way, they would be gecko which is developed by mozilla. So if 10 years from now mozilla goes the data route then we could be back in the same predicament.
Of course, those forks might not add crypto or screw over creators by affiliate link highjacking so I get there's more to it then that.
But either way, I kinda look at these things like the Signal messenger argument. Is it a perfect solution? No, some people say go further because it's centralized but it does offer a great mix of security and eas of access. And I think those trade offs apply to browsers as well.
Anyways, thanks again and have a good one as well! I appreciate the discussion!
I like how it starts with getting off Twitter and trying out Lemmy and ends with switching to Linux.
Lots of these are still American, and Bluesky isnt any-less of a walled garden, they just haven't reached enshitification-critical-mass yet.
Yeah, the list does not fit this community
Headquarters Seattle, Washington, United States
I strongly support Homeassistant. The sheer amount of features they've added and the community built around it make it a no brainer for home automation.
OP, quite a few of these are still American, some open source, some not. It's more like a generic list of alternatives to mainstream.
Saying “this FOSS is American” is a little like saying “any wheat in a meal makes it Egyptian because that’s where wheat comes from.” FOSS doesn’t have borders, because it can be used, forked, and modified by anyone. Even if an American created it, as soon as it becomes FOSS, it is a worldwide project.
When it's FOSS it doesn't matter so much where they're based, fortunately
Revanced is just a cracked YouTube app isn't it?
It goes beyond just cracking, with support for features like SponsorBlock and Return YouTube Dislike, but essentially yes. It's not a meaningful YouTube "alternative", just a tweaked version of same.
Yes it is, if you want something different there is Newpipe, Tubular (with sponsor block and returndislike) , or Freetube. Probably others as well.
None of these let you login, if that is something you need.
They all still rely on YouTube for content. Of course the problem is that the real alternatives (such as PeerTube) have only a fraction of the content.
Ecosia is a German web search engine based on Bing and Google's index.
Qwant is a French web search engine based on Bing but which has been working on its own index for a while.
I just found out that Ecosia and Qwant started teaming up last year to build a European search index. I hope something will come out of it.
https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/
PeerTub is developped by French non-profit Framasoft, which also develops multiple de-gooling apps: collaborative docs, forms, agenda, or host other open-source collaboration tools. https://degooglisons-internet.org/en/
I hope something will come out of it.
Same, as soon as I heard they were developing an European search index i instantly switched to Qwant.
While this list is itself could use a major rework, I'm happy to see that this list, originally posted on reddit specifically, gives visibility to lemmy as a reddit alternative.
Revanced is cool and all, but there are alternatives. One of them is Newpipe and its forks, it's my personal favourite. Pretty sure 95% of people here already know it. But fyi, they have their own associated little nonprofit organisation based in Germany, the Newpipe e.V., which I found out about only recently and thought was pretty neat.
Where is my beloved son f-droid?
Droid-ify is an alternative frontend for f-droid
Reminder: Stremio can use Torrents. Be aware of your local laws before enabling Torrent addons.
Threema is a swiss based messenger which e2e encryption.
Why is blue sky in the right side column? It’s the same thing as X.
The phrase about freedom and convenience in the OP image reminds me of what France's foreign minister recently said about Europe's relationship with the USA:
Home assistant is the gold standard for home automation now, they are light-years ahead of anything from the big tech. Billions of dollars and they can't even make a usable home automation service.
Why is no one mentioning Delta as alternative chat app? it is neat, has bots and mini apps, multi device too.
I recently moved Gmail, Google Docs and Sheets, Google Keep (tasks) and Drive to Mailbox.org. It's super affordable and works really well. You can edit docs/sheets online or offline. No self-hosting required. I recommend it. It's located in Germany.
Nextcloud is not the same as Google Drive. Element is not the same as Netflix. Recommending bluesky as a replacement for X is at least misleading, it is neither European nor free nor is it anywhere near better than X.
Edit: Stremio comparison with Netflix wanted to say
Yep, most things on that list are not drop-in replacements for these products at all, as you're supposed to change your behavior entirely. i.e.:
- For Nextcloud, you have to self-host or to search for a provider. Nextcloud themselves aren't offering any cloud services;
- Same for Element (which is Matrix);
- Flashes is just Bluesky, but with only photos - these same photos can be posted on Bluesky directly.
- ReVanced as an alternative to YouTube? You gotta be joking.
- Stremio - if you're not looking for piracy, then this is not for you. But it's a nice touch though
- Immich - you can only self-host it
- Brave; Firefox - they're the lesser evil, yet they're still American
- For Droid-ify - you gotta jump to Android first. If you want to stay on Apple, use Alt Store
Probably the most feasible things for the regular folk to jump to are Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Lemmy (self-hosting is not mandatory), Jitsi, Ecosia, LineageOS (if they switch phones) and Linux Mint (or any flavor of Linux for that matter).
Where does the Element Netflix comparison came from?
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