this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
359 points (98.9% liked)

Buy European

6534 readers
902 users here now

Overview:

The community to discuss buying European goods and services.


Matrix Chat of this community


Rules:

  • Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.

  • Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:

  • Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.

  • No russian suggestions.

Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:

  • No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or xenophobia.
  • No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies.
  • No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users.
  • Do not share intentionally false or misleading information.
  • Do not spam or abuse network features.
  • Alt accounts are permitted, but all accounts must list each other in their bios.
  • No generative AI content.

Useful Websites

Benefits of Buying Local:

local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.

European Instances

Lemmy:

Friendica:

Matrix:


Related Communities:

Buy Local:

Continents:

European:

Buying and Selling:

Boycott:

Countries:

Companies:

Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:


Banner credits: BYTEAlliance


founded 5 months ago
MODERATORS
top 48 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[โ€“] wax@feddit.nu 9 points 1 hour ago

Open source and socialised software across the EU please, not predatory big tech companies.

[โ€“] silver_wings_of_morning@feddit.dk 9 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

Starting with the assumption that the US does many technology related things better, we should just adopt a mantra of making second-best copies of whatever the US does better.

Catching up is always quicker and cheaper than being the first to get there.

Invest in copying.

China is way ahead of the US, this will take a long time and even then will never work.

[โ€“] tfm@europe.pub 7 points 4 hours ago

Even better, do it in the public! FOSS is the way to go

[โ€“] FelixCress@lemmy.world 9 points 5 hours ago (3 children)
[โ€“] someguy3@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago

The point is to have a growth sector.

[โ€“] Fedditor385@lemmy.world 5 points 4 hours ago

You need to have something shitty to see if the other thing is good. Otherwise we will just build EU-approved Meta that does the same shit from all over again.

[โ€“] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 hours ago

And use the tax money to help fund open source alternatives? Yes please

[โ€“] Renohren@lemmy.today 15 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (1 children)

This is all talk. The EU and European countries are articulating what they know their population and the EU tech sector wants them to do BUT in the end, they will do none of it. Maybe vote a few laws, fund a few cheap FOSS projects that will never truly be applied/ used by EU countries except for a handful of cities, public services. But it will remain a minority as long as the EU puts the interests of the financial sector above all others.

Talking spaces such as this lemmysub are places where we, the end users and creators can collaborate to pressure them to at least consider things and get out of this Trump/Xi dependency our politicians want for us.

[โ€“] Pringles@sopuli.xyz 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The EU is slow moving. That can be detrimental to techhnological arms races sometimes, but the stability it provides also has a lot of benefits. Currently they are consulting start-ups in a bid to streamline innovation and incentivize venture capital. Germany is now actively trying to make business administration easier. So the necessary steps are being taken, but it will take time to implement as is the wont of the EU and its member states.

All change starts with talk, but I do think that European politicians see the acute need for a new innovation framework that is tailored to the times. Even when that framework is in place it will take several more years to visibly notice results. But then the EU per definition looks at the long game, so it's not a bad thing per se.

[โ€“] Renohren@lemmy.today 3 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I think you have missed a few chapters, it's not slow moving it's glacial age moving. The free software policies have been already talked about since 2003., that's 22 years ago. None of this is new, it did not appear with trump, nor with the Russian invasions. It's way older projects and it all remains as talks, memorandums, conventions. Never anything enforced, GDPR is not enforced seriously, DMA will not be etc...

Let's not kid ourselves anymore with the voluntary inaction of the EU.

You cannot understand how sorry I am about it. I am the result of a intra European wedding, I went places thanks to EU collaborations, I owe my wages and work hours in big parts to EU wide regulations. I still am an EU cheerleader in many wide ranging subjects. But on this one, in which European countries have the most economic, work opportunities , attraction pole, social benefits to reap for future generations. They are too much listening to the FANGS and banks and not enough to economists. It's basic lip service that has been going on for too long.

[โ€“] Hirom@beehaw.org 7 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Better enforcment of GDPR and DSA may be enought to effectively ban big US tech without passing any new law.

[โ€“] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 4 hours ago

High tech doesn't have to be abusive.

[โ€“] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

This brings up a point I've been meaning to make for awhile: I don't think Europe has it in them.

The UK actually did some innovating, I mean Alan Turing himself was a Limey, and back in the day they had the likes of Sinclair and Acorn, and they invented the ARM processor, they're one of very few nations to have a processor architecture to their name. Basically the rest of computing innovation happened in the United States, like the industrial revolution before, we took what Britain invented and ran with it. Meanwhile Western Europe has had fuck all influence in the last 50 years of computing. The World Wide Web was invented at CERN, sure...by an Englishman. 35 years later, let's take a look at the top 50 visited websites worldwide and see just what Europe has done with their groundbreaking tech.

Of the 50, 30 are American. The top nine: Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, ChatGPT, X/Twitter, WhatsApp, Reddit and Wikipedia, are American. Tenth is Yahoo Japan followed by Yahoo!. The UK does not place on the list, and only four websites are from the EU: Xvideos and XNXX are French, Xhamster and Stripchat are...What's the adjective for 'from Cyprus?" Cyprian? Cyprese? Cypriot, apparently. "Honorable" mentions to Canada and India for their only entries, Pornhub and Eporner respectively.

Meanwhile, South Korea makes the list twice for Samsung.com and Naver.com, which is apparently their Google; they do everything from search and email to online payments and ISP. I'm pretty sure that if the US is descendant, the future is Asian, not European.

Microsoft, Google, Apple, IBM, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Europe has got nothing that even sort of competes with any of them, so for the last few months they've been publishing headlines about another township switching their computers from Windows to Linux. At one point there was announcement that EurOS or whatever they were going to call it was going to be a fork of Fedora...because they forgot SuSe Linux exists. They boldly announced they were switching from getting software directly from Microsoft, to getting it indirectly from IBM. For their x86 computers.

I simply don't think Europeans have it in them; the ones that did moved to the US over the last century and a half.

[โ€“] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Oh great. The rest of the world is apparently only good for getting fucked over...literally.

We need to get our shit together people!

[โ€“] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 1 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

The absolute best Europe could do would be to get machines running a RISC-V architecture running Linux in production and distribution. RISC-V was developed at UC Berkley, GNU at Harvard based on UNIX from Bell Labs and the Linux kernel by a Finnish-American named Torvalds. ARM is probably closer to production ready than RISC-V but you'll have to pay licenses to England and Japan for it.

Oh, and that's all desktop and server stuff. You've got an even deeper ditch to dig to get anything mobile that isn't based on Apple or Google tech. Not even Microsoft managed that.

Even if you did get that done, which you won't, you will have built "European digital sovereignty" upon the crumbs that fell off of America's dinner table. The 21st century was invented in Britain and built by the United States out of parts manufactured in Southeast Asia while Europe masturbated. And this was perfectly acceptable until this year, with the election of Tariff McBlusterCuck. Now you're gonna do it on your own.

Sure.

[โ€“] WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today 1 points 41 minutes ago

Nobody is going to be a slave to a narcissistic, fascist nation.

[โ€“] thorhop@sopuli.xyz 6 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

How about no??

Silicon Valley is an epicenter for the world's most expensive narcicism. For 5k a ticket you'll get first rate sycophancy, the kind Nero would enjoy. There's probably about as many dead sex workers buried underneath silicon valley as there are indigenous corpses underneath boarding schools.

No joke, Silicon Valley needs to die - in a fire.

[โ€“] Mangoholic@lemmy.ml 2 points 6 hours ago

True but that is probably not what the vision is supposed to be.

[โ€“] join@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 hours ago

Breaking news: oil found in Europe.

[โ€“] HocEnimVeni@lemmy.world 15 points 9 hours ago

"American silicon valley, European silicon valley, all made in Taiwan"

~Some Ukrainian guy probably

[โ€“] goldenquetzal@lemmy.world 15 points 10 hours ago

Am American in tech. I would like to come help. Actively trying to get out of this country.

[โ€“] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 0 points 4 hours ago

Will not happen. Companies in EU are not underregulated.

[โ€“] Taalnazi@lemmy.world 42 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (3 children)

No Eurotechbro stuff, thanks.

European tech? Sure. But only if fully decentralised, peer to peer, FOSS, copyleft and all that.

And oh also, bars out fascists.

[โ€“] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 points 4 hours ago

Then it has to be tax funded and will never be self sufficient unfortunately. That means if political winds change, these products will die.

This is just me being a realist. I would of course prefer all of Europe to move to FOSS for the public sector.

[โ€“] Gluca23@lemmy.world 2 points 5 hours ago

So not monetizable. Will never happen, too many interests, and EU is always weak to bribes.

[โ€“] titey@jlai.lu 1 points 8 hours ago

Yes, please!

[โ€“] drmoose@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

How about helping businesses actually stay in Europe. It's almost impossible to scale up in europe due to insane moats everywhere.

[โ€“] supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 86 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

In addition, we must work to create a European Big Tech industry.

yes, but also facepalm this is still missing the point

Big Tech industry

^ taps the sign above my head

THAT is the problem, yes the US version is one of the more aggressive cancers but recognize that the US is a product of the US mindset that worships big tech.

People are running out of water for their families because a category of techbro running my country consider the power hungry datacenters powering this AI "techboom" more important than human lives.

points at the sign

[โ€“] Sl00k@programming.dev 10 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

In a much more regulated environment you would have recycled water instead of destroying families water supplies.

A lot of these critiques are of unregulated capitalism as opposed to the entity of big tech itself. Now can you have big tech without unregulated capitalism maybe not, there's a reason it's as broken of a system as it is.

[โ€“] mormund@feddit.org 42 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Can we not? Silicon Valley sucks and imo hasn't done anything innovative for a long time.

[โ€“] hcf@sh.itjust.works 17 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

I don't think that they haven't been innovative. Moreso, there's a deliberate strategy by FAANG/MIC companies to buy (or bury) smaller startups that are innovating.

Then those bigger companies mothball the tech with no plan to sell or market their acquisitions, nor release the IP rights on what they own.

It's not so much that there's no innovation, it's just good old fashioned tech monopoly behavior.

[โ€“] basxto@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 7 hours ago

That can happen, but I don't think that's the point. a) big companies could invest in expensive research like nobody else (aside from state research) b) these hubs are often about having the right companies and universities in one place, which results in employees and graduates spinning out their own innovative start ups, because the region has all the knowhow and manufacturing they need c) most big companies don't do very risky innovation, instead they buy successful startups to build upon them, but that can still be innovative if they buy them early on and finance further research

[โ€“] skarn@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 15 hours ago

good old fashioned ~~tech~~ monopoly behavior

[โ€“] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 20 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I'm an American who has worked in tech for nearly 30 years and I fully support this, so much so that I'm considering moving to Europe to help build it.

[โ€“] goldenquetzal@lemmy.world 6 points 10 hours ago

Likewise. Actively trying to figure out how to network out of the United States.

[โ€“] warmaster@lemmy.world 13 points 16 hours ago

"We will produce our own TechBrosโ„ข with blackjack and hookers."

[โ€“] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 11 points 15 hours ago

Even if you are American, you should support this movement. The best way to end or reverse enshittification is through competition. The big American tech companies are no longer competing to make good or innovative products. They are competing to see who can monetize the most while risking the least.

[โ€“] jojo@piefed.social 11 points 17 hours ago

Yes, another Silicon Valley is definitely what we need โ˜ ๏ธ

[โ€“] TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 6 points 15 hours ago

you don't have to have a silicon valley

[โ€“] Ptsf@lemmy.world 5 points 16 hours ago

Ban might be a bit much, but we're using tariffs and taxes as a confrontational trade war measure. Might as well use them in return and funnel the proceeds into homegrown solutions that can compete legitimately.

[โ€“] BaroqueInMind@piefed.social 3 points 15 hours ago

And please hurry.