Alternatives to US-Based Digital Services
This is not meant to be a political discussion, but more just practical information to have on hand. The country which hosts many digital services is currently undergoing rapid political change. Just in case any of those services are affected, it is worth knowing about alternatives:
https://switching.software/
https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to I don't directly use any Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon products and don't have accounts for any of these. I have one (almost always) off-line Mac used solely for music production, and I realise some web services I occasionally use will be hosted on Azure or Amazon or possible use Google services behind the scenes. All my computers run Linux. I flashed my Android phone with LineageOS as soon as I bought it to remove all direct Google dependencies. My browser of choice is Firefox, I use Open Office and a raft of open source software alternatives including utilities I've written myself. For news I have RSS feeds which, yes, will sometimes take me to Reddit and YCombinator. But I'm also active on Mastodon and other ActivityPub apps; that sector is growing steadily in both user numbers and software maturity. Does anyone know of alternatives to reddit.com and/or news.ycombinator.com? Lemmy has everything that Reddit does.
It's federated - I would recommend lemmy.world or lemmy.ml for people from HackerNews Honestly I’m not so concerned with either. Reddit: Except for the larger subreddits, on the smaller ones moderation is done by a few people where common sense still seems to rein and fake news is quickly called out. As long as Reddit doesn’t start censoring topics which the Trump government now considers controversial I don’t worry. Hacker News: I do not worry about that either. Though since the election results a few unconditional Trump supports seem to come out of the woodwork, common sense still seems to be the primary tone here. Those are really my personal criteria: Sane moderation, no hiding of topics that might be controversial to the new government. In both of those Twitter, and from now on Meta seems to lack.