Non-US-based alternatives to popular services

by realty_geek on 4/5/2025, 10:33:48 AM with 14 comments

  • by remram on 4/6/2025, 1:26:16 PM

    Seems similar to https://european-alternatives.eu/ which was summitted a couple of times already

  • by pjmlp on 4/6/2025, 8:58:35 AM

    Eventually we might also need non-US driven programming languages and OSes, that are needed to power such non-US based services.

  • by dangus on 4/6/2025, 1:05:58 AM

    I'm all for resources for people looking for alternatives, but I think there are some flaws with the way this is presented.

    The whole first section is a bunch of scary stuff that in the end is not really a great way to select products, at least in my personal opinion. If you are worried about nation-state spying you aren't going to use any cloud services, and you shouldn't take a company's location as any sort of reasonable way to protect yourself if you are truly on that level of tin foil hat.

    > If the company has servers, offices, or employees in the US, it can be legally forced to hand over your data to the US government.

    Yeah, including many of the alternatives that are on this list.*

    I also think a lot of the alternatives have their own flaws.

    - Alternatives that are listed with "Strong privacy laws, GDPR applies." Well, the GDPR applies to any user in the EU using a product made by a US-based tech company. So choosing a company solely for GDPR coverage isn't really a particularly good reason to choose it.

    - Alternatives like Opera and Deepseek have offices in China which for many people concerned about state surveillance isn't exactly an upgrade.

    - Some alternatives on the list have US servers and US ownership, like Tidal (owned by Block (Square), a US company).

  • by amazingamazing on 4/6/2025, 2:29:31 PM

    What’s the non us alternative to this site?

  • by MonkeyClub on 4/9/2025, 11:17:48 PM

    Interesting how it's on GitHub, which is US-based and corporate-owned.

    May I suggest https://codeberg.org/ as a GitHub alternative?

  • by nixgeek on 4/6/2025, 4:46:35 PM

    If your threat model needs to include “I’m (going to be) a target of major nation-state intelligence community agencies” then it’s safest to assume none of this is going to prevent them getting your data?

    James Mickens covered this at Monitorama 2014 in a humorous way. https://vimeo.com/95066828 (16:30)

  • by joemazerino on 4/7/2025, 12:56:57 PM

    Do people not think the EU spy agencies.. Spy?