- cross-posted to:
- utilisereuropeen@jlai.lu
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This list seems a bit flawed, for instance on the travel line, Trivago is owned by Expedia in the US and Booking is headquartered in Amsterdam.
Also including BlueSky seems a little odd given the intent
Re Bluesky I did some “I am not a lawyer” digging.
Bluesky is owned by “Bluesky Social PBC”, a Public Benefit Company registered in Delaware.
Generally speaking it means when decisions about the company are made, they must take into account how that decision benefits their stated public value. I struggled to find the specific value wording, but let’s assume it’s a reasonable one for the time being.
Unfortunately being a PBC is basically voluntary, especially when you’re still a private company. You can become a non-PBC with a simple board vote. (A public company would require a stockholder vote.)
Bluesky’s board consists of four members, one of which is Bain Capital, aka the company funding Bluesky.
So Bluesky is absolutely a better alternative to Twitter. If everyone left Twitter and moved to Bluesky that would be a monumental improvement.
However Bluesky is not a non-profit company, as the above graphic states.
bluesky is just Xlite.
This
Huh, Bain is Romney’s group. Didn’t know they were involved there.
Trivago isn’t completely “owned” by Expedia, but Expedia does own a majority of the company stock. Its headquarters are in Germany, and 100% of its employees are there.
Booking.com is 100% owned by Priceline, a US company. They also have a long string of international controversies.
Bluesky has to be running a massive propaganda push. I see so many lies saying they are decentralized or like here saying they are a non-profit.
This shit is evil. Whoever is making these fliers is not being honest.
It’s more important to get people off twitter. Mastodon just doesn’t have the right pull right now.
Regardless, flat-out lying and saying that Bluesky is non-profit is a bad look.
I agree.
Taking sides in a
warkerfuffle between billionaires that don’t care about you is just weird nonsense.Go as fossy as possible and support your devs directly.
Shout-out to Sharkey! We’re young, hip and have reactions other than “heart”. Plus, we can talk to Mastodon instances and it all just works. Ever thought what your social network needed was unlockable achievements? We’ve got that, too!
You made me look up Sharkey and create a Sharkey account, just letting you know you had some impact.
uis sick, easy to run an instance with yunohost too, I always wanted discord like emojis for twitter posts
Awesome! I hope you enjoy it :)
Neat - any public instances accepting registrations?
btw lil formatting quirk on Safari iOS (maybe just appropriate punishment 😉) if y’all know who has edit access
There’s some: https://sharkey.fediverse.observer/list . The “active users” listed on that chart is inaccurate, though.
I’ll see if I can figure out who can fix that formatting quirk (probably not me, also am afk/at a convention this weekend 😊).
It’s basically filling the void the Xitter transition created. Either way, we got a massive boost in the decentralised space.
This is misinformation. BlueSky is not a non profit. It is a public benefit company. The shareholders still expect profit.
The shareholders expect growth and therefore increase in the value of their investment, public benefit companies are however under no obligation to their shareholders to pass on profits to shareholders in the form of dividends. It’s definitely not a non-profit either though, it’s a different structure.
Plenty of “regular” for profit companies focus on increasing share value by investing profits back into the company instead of paying out dividends. That doesn’t really mean anything.
Edit: I see what you mean based on what I said. They expect a return on investment is a better way to phrase it.
And for software like Microsoft and Adobe:
Some more recommendations
Category FOSS Media player mpv Drawing Krita Vectorial illustration Inkscape Video editing Kdenlive Music making Ardour I don’t know Ardour but these are actually solid!
Look, I love Audacity which is an awesome audio editor but it is absolutely not an alternative to Logic or Fl, which are DAWs.
FreeCAD is a start, but nowhere as good as AutoCAD, unfortunately. I haven’t tried GIMP’s v3.0 version yet, but 2.x is terrible to use. Depending on what you need to do, Krita would be a better alternative.
Audacity isn’t a good replacement at all for those. It has a different purpose. There should be LMMS and Ardour instead
The best alternative to commercial CAD systems is commercial CAD systems if you know what I mean. That said, FreeCAD is the only option if you want to run on Linux. Inventor, Solidworks, AutoCAD, etc, are all borked even in wine.
I’ve never really tried it, but onshape is browser based.
I never really cared for onshape/simscale or fusion. Maybe I am just oldschool but the whole browser based thing didn’t sit right with me for CAD stuff.
I’ve worked professionally with a lot of CAD systems in the past (Caria, Solidworks, Siemens NX, Creo …) and Onshape feels so refreshing compared to all of these “old school” CAD systems.
The git like system to manage to manage version for example works extremely well, performance wise it can be used on a potato and being browser based it can be used on Linux.
The design process is extremely smooth and intuitive.
My only problem with it is that unfortunately all the data is cloud based and it requires a constant internet connection but so far I have not found a worthy alternative.
Yeah, the versioning and operations history functions a similar to an always refreshing l pdm suite imo which can be handy but I never found it to be all that much better for my needs. I didn’t play with the version merging functions much though. The only via internet aspect was a dealbreaker for me from a functional and security perspective.
Word alternative: I started trying out OnlyOffice, based in Latvia. So far it seems decent. Definitely doesn’t look as dated as Open- and LibreOffice.
Logic, FL Studio alternative: Audacity is in my opinion not a serious alternative. If you want simple voice overs, sure, but otherwise no. I’d recommend Reaper instead. Not open source, but there aren’t many DAWs that are (maybe Ardour, but I don’t have experience with it ). Reaper is really open as far as proprietary DAWs go.
There are so many issues with this, lots of wrong information, recommendations of stuff that’s bad and really shouldn’t be recommended and stuff that really should be there isn’t. Please don’t share it this further, it’s absolutely shit.
“Perfect is the enemy of good. Please accept this slop.”
TBF, it says “European”, not “good”.
It gets very obvious when it reccomends basically just volkswagens and volkswagen rebadges under cars.
“Oh no this is wrong”… proceeds to shit on it, not provide a single example or correction
BlueSky is not owned by a non profit. First row.
I’m not in it but I have been told it’s almost impossible to control the narrative as Muskrat does on Twitter
It is held by a benefit corporation which means they have to, at least pretend, to bring some societal benefit
While AT Protocol is sort of federated in a sense, no one really runs aggregators (which serves half of the role an instance does in ActivityPub) besides BlueSky themselves, so they can still control it if they wanted to.
Also, “normal” for profit companies can also pretend to want to bring good to the world. It’s misinformation because public benefit companies are allowed to collect a profit (post says non profit).
I still believe BlueSky is world’s better than Twitter! But it’s important to be honest about it.
Totally fair
Home to Go is just a search engine for VRBO, which is a US company owned by Expedia. It is not a replacement for Airbnb, nor does it stop supporting US companies.
Good to know. See? Some actual actionable information
So whats a better list, or what should be removed?
Also: avoid AKG, consider Austrian Audio.
AKG is a popular brand in professional music and audiophile circles. It was bought by Samsung in 2016, who promptly drove the company into the ground, closed their Austrian facilities, and moved headquarters to America and production to SE-Asia. AKG’s name is now used for brand recognition on Samsung’s generic big tech garbage. Yes, I’m still salty about it.
Austrian Audio was founded by the actual engineers who worked at AKG, currently owned by a Danish audio tech company. They produce high-end professional headphones.
Sennheiser and beyerdynamic are also big competitors in the hi-fi market. Both are German.
Pretty ironic that the website that created this, buy-european-made.eu, is actually promoting their Reddit community. They should really switch to an EU-hosted Lemmy instance, and also join Mastodon, just like european-alternatives.eu: @european_alternatives@mastodon.social
Completely missing are power tools and guns. So please buy Bosch, Festool, Hilti, H&K, Cz., Glock, FN.
I missed the “and guns” part of your first sentence, which made me think, “Whoa, I gotta get me a Glock power drill.”
Good to know about Bosch, Festool, and Hilti, thanks for the info. My ancient Dewalt drill just started smoking, so I now know where to look.
If you want something really good get Makita from Japan. Bosch has two quality levels green is meh to good, blue is very good.
Thanks! I’m just a hapless homeowner who occasionally roleplays being handy enough to fix things (though my last shelving unit for my basement came out remarkably level, surprisingly).
(I had actually been hoping to repair the Dewalt, as it’s a hand-me-down from my dad (fuck cancer), but I’m pretty sure it’d be a lost cause (the drill is at least 20 years old, probably older, I’m pretty sure I remember my dad using it when I was a kid).)
I’m still using my deceased dad’s orange drill from the 1970s made by Black+Decker.
Fuck cancer, I concur.
Fun fact, Hilti, a Liechtenstein company, has 34000 employees. The country itself has 40000 citizens.
Yes, they produce mostly abroad afaik. Another somewhat known company from Liechtenstein is cable maker Neutrik. If you’ve even been in a pro audio or broadcasting studio or a scientific lab, you probably have used their cables.
Avoid American gun companies like Sig Sauer, and support Swiss and EU gun companies like Sig Sauer
All kidding aside also worth mentioning are Beretta, Benelli, and Steyr
The list does have an hard on for hating everything that is not german.
How can you make appliances list without Miele?
If you are in the market for a vacuum cleaner do yourself a favor, go more expensive and get a Miele, especially if you have some carpets, most vacuums can do a job on hard floors, but damn the difference of vacuuming carpets either a cheap vacuum vs my Miele is night and day.
(Don’t know about the rest of their products, but they are german and a family owned business)
Every student home I’ve lived in had Miele appliances, indestructible like Nokia phones.
True.
But also not really the usual student budget.
I think they mean “rentals for students”
Yes, I understood as such.
It’s balancing between cheap & cheap to replace vs actually good and lasting.
Their washing machines are beasts. In a good way.
Also at least in the UK the best KitchenAid alternative has got to be Kenwood. Love my mixer.
You do know that RedBull is owned by a right-wing extremist in Salzburg who tries to undermine Austrian democracy with Servus TV the same way Murdoch and Springer do in Germany and elsewhere?
Proton’s CEO supports Trump despite being an EU based company:
Proton is a Swiss company, not EU
Sure, but it’s listed in the image on services.
Europe is a continent, EU is the European Union which has 27 member countries in Europe that are not Switzerland.
Yes, absolutely. Again, not the point of my comment which is the chart the OP posted has some questionable suggestions if you’re picking and choosing businesses based on their political support (which I fully support people doing)
Europe != E.U.
They support their pockets
Hello and welcome to the point!
Consider buying Solovairs instead of Dr martens. They’re basically the same, the main difference is that they are made in the UK in a factory that used to make Dr martens before they delocalized their production to Asia
When my Solovair became too worn to wear, they sent me replacement soles, like, the whole bottom half of the shoe, and put me in touch with their repair guy to have them put on. Great service through and through, and lovely people!
This list has some issues, Booking.com is Dutch and Philips’ Consumer division is just a name that whitelabels other companies products and is owned by a Chinese investment company.
Booking.com is owned by an American company though
Also, Ecosia and Qwant rely on Bing for their search results I believe
or Google, but they are working together on their own search engine from what I heard
Booking is 100% owned by Priceline (renamed Booking Holdings). They only paid $113M for the company in 2005. That’s a damn steal.
The other travel “alternatives” are either owned by Expedia, majority stock holders by Expedia, or just act as a front end search for Expedia and VRBO. It’s honestly ridiculous.
Interesting, didn’t know this. Thanks for pointing it out.
DON’T SPREAD STUPID SH*** LIKE THAT.
What a BS honestly, I am fully anti Trump but this does not help at all. Why? Some examples:
- You think supporting European faschist enablers (e.g. Red Bull) is better than [insert random US company here] is just silly.
- Do your homework: Capri Sun is German, not American, gosh.
- Blueeky is NOT non-profit, stop spreading misinfirmation
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It still helps because you are buying european which is better for europe also you called every single company in the list fascist with this logic, a lot of them arent, idk what redbull did tho.
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It is german but pretty sure its sold by coca cola.
It doesn’t help because most of those “euro” options are publicly traded on American stock markets where the fascists make their money lol. You booked on trivago instead of some other place great now that stock went up and the well invested musks of the world just made some money anyway. Money they will use to influence elections all over the world.
My response to you and the OP is simple: you don’t counter faschist stupidity with stupidity, but with nuance. That’s the difference between them and us, not where you produce or buy.
But its not just about fascism. If you actually want to counter fascism you dont just go “im not gonna buy this product”, you actually have to take action. Anyone thinking a few people not buying a product will change the situation is a bit too optimistic. Even if you stop one of em another one pops up. You have to take action to change the system. But circling back yo buying european its still a pretty good thing overall so that europe can have a stronger economy. Anyone opposing this is like the people who voted for trump becsuse kamala wasnt any better. She was better and she couldve been even better if you voted for her and then protested to make her do what you want.
A large social movement to reduce imports from a given country and support local manufacturing can indeed still be of great benefit and can materially hinder the success of fascism though.
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L for Proton mention.
CEO is fascist loving boot licker
Edit: company rescinded statement Andy Ten Yen made
I am still waiting for anyone to give actual evidence for that. Stating on twitter that the Democrats were unwilling to even listen to their concerns, while the Republicans were willing to meet, seems to be quite far from bootlicking imo.
The whole outrage seemed to be engineered in the same way there were people claiming Proton would be a CIA assets, but never providing any lead, not even some obscure untrustworthy website making such a claim.
Looks like the company officially recinded the statement Andy Yen made. Posted text to avoid Xitter link
Tap for spoiler
We want to clarify that Proton’s CEO did not endorse Trump, only the Republican nominee for antitrust. Nevertheless, we have retracted the statement, which was put out by mistake due to an internal miscommunication. For further information, you can also see this Reddit thread that contains an analysis of why many believe that Proton and our CEO are not supporting any party:
https://old.reddit.com/r/Anarchism/comments/1id5v21/does_proton_really_support_trump)
Proton is not controlled by any single person, but by the non profit Proton Foundation which has neutrality in its governing principles and we remain committed to the neutrality principle. The Proton Foundation is also legally obligated in its charter to defend freedom and democracy.
Fastmail is a good non US alternative. Based in Australia.
For those that don’t know about Proton. Proton CEO said “10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned.” The company then doubled down on a Reddit post which it eventually deleted.
You have to be blind or a liar to look at what the Republicans have done in the last 10 years and think they pro little guy.
Despite claiming political neutrality, Proton later issued a statement reiterating its support for stronger antitrust measures, particularly against Big Tech. The company noted that regardless of broader political views on the Republican platform, the appointment of Gail Slater as head of the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Donald Trump was a positive step.
So they don’t care how bad the government is as long as it helps them. So not a Nazi but willing to support them if they can get something out of it. Furthermore it is also not true. The US under Trump has threatened Europe multiple times to defend big Tech.
Proton further argued that major tech companies were attempting to align with Trump because his administration posed an “unprecedented challenge to their monopolistic dominance.” This statement only fueled concerns that Proton was leaning politically despite its claims of neutrality.
They don’t seem to understand what politically neutral is. Also if you wanted a president that went after big tech, Biden did way more than Trump:
Under President Biden, the DOJ and FTC have taken a more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement.
The Justice Department filed another suit against Google over its dominance in the advertising technology space and sued Apple for allegedly monopolizing the smartphone market.
Biden’s FTC also sued Amazon for antitrust violations, accusing the e-commerce giant of engaging in anticompetitive behavior to dominate the online retail space.
Proton also lied about logging user data.
In 2021, Proton Mail admitted to handing over a user’s IP address to Swiss authorities following a request from French law enforcement via Europol. This revelation contradicted Proton’s earlier claims that it did not log user data.
Yikes that’s worse than I thought
You seem to simply disagree with him on “going after big tech” when it comes to antitrust. The guy also mentioned why he thinks democrats are a lost cause in the antitrust space.
So they don’t care how bad the government is as long as it helps them
This is a complete non sequitur from the previous paragraph. The reasonable conclusion is that they (or better, HE) don’t care if it’s a republican or a Democrat pushing for antitrust enforcement. They didn’t endorse the government, they didn’t campaign for them, they praised that pick, and if it is a good pick why shouldn’t them? Everyone benefits from big tech monopolies being broken up.
Now, we might disagree with his opinion, I personally think it was naive and overly optimistic, but having an opinion like that is completely legitimate.
Proton also lied about logging user data.
False. What they did was 100% expected by any company. They have been forced to log that particular user data, because complying with laws is a requirement to run a business. Not logging data is not a control that cannot be implemented in a way that can’t be reverted. They had to be forced to log user data because they didn’t, which proves exactly the opposite of what you are claiming.
If you want to take it up with someone here, take it up with governments who abuse antiterrorism laws. Any company in any jurisdiction could be forced to do the same.
Same for the case where they handed out the recovery email address of that user. 100% expected and a great proof of how little data they have about users.
Edit: For completeness here is an article from someone who went through past history (words and actions) for Proton https://medium.com/@ovenplayer/does-proton-really-support-trump-a-deeper-analysis-and-surprising-findings-aed4fee4305e
We can argue about the nuances of the reasoning; but the crux of the matter is that the CEO posted a statement that praised Trump and criticized the Democrats; and the followed up with an “official Proton position” which doubled down - again praising the Republican party and criticizing the Democrats.
This cannot be described as ‘politically neutral’, regardless of what reasoning or opinions underpin it.
They have never been politically neutral when it comes to antitrust and privacy (well, antitrust has direct implication for privacy). They spell that out as the exception quite clearly, an thankfully they are not. In this context, praising Trump and/or criticizing democrats in this context is A-okay for me. I did not have a problem even with that being their official position, TBH, but I can agree that it was a poor decision.
They did similar posts in the past, see https://proton.me/blog/trump-controls-nsa-fbi or even similarly political content like this. Additionally, most of the orgs they donate to are clearly politically aligned.
So I genuinely don’t see the problem in them having a clear position on antitrust, even if it happens to praise trump or republicans.
