Give me some European alternatives to my apps
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You have frdroid, fennec for fdroid(a build of firefox without the proprietary stuff) is probably the best browser you can use. Brave is full of bloat, crypto, etc, the ceo also funds anti gay orginizations. Install a few extensions like ublock, decentralize, sponsorblock, etc and youll get the best web experience that is currently possible.
similarly, kagi funds brave so less directly funds all the same stuff as them
What’s the grayed out one?
Brave🇺🇸 -> Vivaldi🇳🇴, Qwant🇫🇷, Ecosia🇩🇪, Mojeek🇬🇧, Waterfox🌐
Tiktok🇨🇳 -> Loops.video🌐
Kagi Translate🇺🇸 -> DeepL🇩🇪 (but from my experience kagi is wayy better)
Kagi Translate to Deepl.
But the first thing I recommend, is to replace TikTok with no TikTok.
And Roblox to no Roblox.
I’m not interested in using my texts to train AI; are there any other options?
All translation services use AI, and have done for decades. There’s pretty much no other way to do it.
You’re absolutely right and I think more people need to understand this. What we now call “AI” refers to a lot of things that are not new and have been happening for decades, just without the complete and callous disregard for humanity that the current AI companies are exemplifying.
The thing is, the things they were doing didn’t used to be called AI, nobody pretended machine learning models were intelligent. People really need to start learning more of the terminology around these technologies, because it’s important, even if you hate them. You might even learn that you don’t have to hate all of them, because they’re not all the same. AI is an ugly label being painted onto everything in software nowadays with broad strokes and a lot of it is deserved but there is significant room for nuance here and people should endeavor to have a more nuanced understanding of the topic than they currently do. AI is not LLM which is not GPT which is not computer vision which is not machine learning which is not agentic coding which is not tool usage which is not Generative AI which is not chatbots which is not sentience.
“ALL AI: BAD!” is the logic of a simpleton. Don’t be a simpleton. Educate yourself, and begin to understand what about it is bad, because there is plenty about it that is very bad indeed. This technology is going to be transformative whether you love it or hate it. Even if it’s 100% terrible (and honestly it’s not) you still need to know your enemy. Trying to fight against something you don’t understand is the first step to losing.
Diabolical to hit them with the “You’re absolutely right”
I’m glad it wasn’t lost on people. Still gotta have some fun sometimes, especially when I’m pissed off about the state of the world.
The whole concept of AI is evolving. When OCR was new, that was cutting edge AI. Nowadays, even your phone can pull text out of a photo. It’s still based on neural networks, but people don’t really think of it as AI any more.
What about the selective background blurring during a video call? Also AI. What about frame generation or resolution up scaling? Also AI. There are lots of examples like this, and people don’t really think of them as AI any more.
The actual issue is that they do think it’s AI, meaning, they think the phone is using a local llm model and sending the image there so it magically does the OCR or some shit.
They don’t know that there are specialized NN, be it CNN for image processing or RNN for language processing. And frankly they don’t need to know, it’s not their purview, as long as they don’t talk shit as if they knew 😅
Oh yeah, there’s so much AI in everything we do nowadays. For years now, Apple has been casually mentioning AI in pretty much every WWDC. Until recently, all of it has been easy-to-ignore type of AI. If it doesn’t generate images or text, it doesn’t really feel like “real AI”, and consequently, tends to fly under the radar.
the one baked into firefox downloads small specialized models and runs on your device.
https://f-droid.org/packages/dev.davidv.translator
Offline on-device translator. Also uses AI because what else?
if you don’t want to feed your texts to the corpus for ai training, you better go live in a forest, because anything appearing on the internet inevitably ends up in the training corpus.
If your distaste is particularly about translation apps, then you can selfhost an llm even on your phone, and use it for translation. Even a really small one would be ok, as LLMs are designed primarily for tasks like these, even tho everyone seems to forget this.
A self-hosted AI?
There’s also Loops as an alternative.
What is TikTok doing there.
Does it matter? The question is whether there is an alternative. I don’t know of any, but I have no need for tiktok-like apps anyway.
I actually read the post wrong tbh. Thought this was a list of European alternatives.
There are alternatives, but nothing on a large scale. Video hosting is really expensive and hard to monetize. Loops would be the largest.
I would start with
- Brave -> Vivaldi
- Tiktok -> No Tiktok (wtf)
- Kagi Translate -> DeepL
These are the easy ones; then you can consider moving others.
Alternative to Ente is Immich which I have recently set up. You need to run your own server but it’s 100x better and it’s open source
I really want to stop using Ente and start using Immich (overall, I want to self-host a lot of services with a server in my own home), but right now I’m not in a position to set up that server yet. Do you have any other alternatives to Ente that don’t require self-hosting?
Just FYI both ente and immich are US based, open source and both can be selfhosted. I tried both and they are both good.
If no data reaches the US (because it’s self hosted) and no money goes to the US (because it’s open source), does it matter that the developers are in the US?
It probably doesn’t, and that was not my point. I am okay using US soft if it’s open source. That said US based project might be under certain pressures from the govt which adds a slight amount of uncertainty.
Ente can be self hosted?
Yes and they made it super easy. I mean kudos to ente basically making it easy not to pay them (I pay them anyway 😀)
https://ente.com/help/self-hosting/
Yup! I run it on my VPS for my family with an Exoscale S3 bucket, it’s excellent. I only pay for the storage we use.
Games? Brawl stars replacement? Anything?
Camera could be replaced by a European camera maker like Leica.
please don’t use brave, it’s just bloatware:
https://piefed.social/c/opensource/p/1649276/you-need-to-stop-using-brave
sorry, i can not offer you a european alternative at this point. there might be, i just don’t know
Vivaldi’s a good European web browser
It is Chromium, however, and not fully Open Source. I recommend Librewolf or Waterfox, open source forks of firefox.
OP posted an android homescreen.
Waterfox is on mobile
I’m still pretty new to the foss community (just installed Linux Mint on a VERY old computer so I can get some experience under my belt!) But I was wondering if you knew of a way to download Waterfox without using the Play Store? Thanks!
I don’t know where they release it tbh, i use Fennec on mobile which removes the mozilla tracking from Firefox just like Waterfox does, but you can install it from f-droid
Zen browser, while privacy isn’t its main focus, has an awesome user interface and a bunch of QoL features and I ended up switching from Firefox.
you can install Ublock origin for the privacy, and change a couple settings to make it on par with librewolf
also no inbuilt ai as far as i know.
Zen is Windows-onlyEdit: I checked their web and they do have a Linux and Mac version, but the other versions are pretty hidden.
FWIW, it’s not only on Linux but Mac as well.
Zen is on Linux as well, i’m using it on Linux
Maybe replace Brave with Cromite (assuming that OP needs Chromium based browser)? I’m not sure if Cromite is European but it’s not controlled by a company and it’s FOSS
stick to brave, despite having more features it’s more efficient and faster
i don’t think there will ever be a european browser. foss is global
If you want to support an homophobe, go ahead and use Brave ig
