Buy European
Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Rules:
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Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.
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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:
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Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.
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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.
Benefits of Buying Local:
local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.
European Instances
Lemmy:
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Basque Country: https://lemmy.eus/
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🇧🇪 Belgium: https://0d.gs/
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🇧🇬 Bulgaria: https://feddit.bg/
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Catalonia: https://lemmy.cat/
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🇩🇰 Denmark, including Greenland (for now): https://feddit.dk/
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🇪🇺 Europe: https://europe.pub/
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🇫🇷🇧🇪🇨🇭 France, Belgium, Switzerland: https://jlai.lu/
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🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭🇱🇮 Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein: https://feddit.org/
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🇫🇮 Finland: https://sopuli.xyz/ & https://suppo.fi/
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🇮🇸 Iceland: https://feddit.is/
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🇮🇹 Italy: https://feddit.it/
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🇱🇹 Lithuania: https://group.lt/
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🇳🇱 Netherlands: https://feddit.nl/
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🇵🇱 Poland: https://fedit.pl/ & https://szmer.info/
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🇵🇹 Portugal: https://lemmy.pt/
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🇸🇮 Slovenia: https://gregtech.eu/
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🇸🇪 Sweden: https://feddit.nu/
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🇹🇷 Turkey: https://lemmy.com.tr/
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🇬🇧 UK: https://feddit.uk/
Matrix:
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🇬🇧 UK: matrix.org & glasgow.social
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🇫🇷 France: tendomium & imagisphe.re & hadoly.fr
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🇩🇪 Germany: tchncs.de, catgirl.cloud, pub.solar, yatrix.org, digitalprivacy.diy, oblak.be, nope.chat, envs.net, hot-chilli.im, synod.im & rollenspiel.chat
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🇳🇱 Netherlands: bark.lgbt
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🇦🇹 Austria: gemeinsam.jetzt & private.coffee
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🇫🇮 Finland: pikaviestin.fi
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Continents:
European:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
Countries:
Companies:
Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:
Banner credits: BYTEAlliance
view the rest of the comments
Thanks for your kind words and thoughtful questions! :)
Here’s the quick breakdown:
Why a Company?
In Germany, liability protection is essential for any public project. Using an existing company (a common practice) minimizes personal risk. Many projects operate similarly - they just don’t always highlight their legal structure. We’re transparent because the law requires an imprint, not because we’re "corporate".
Data Ownership
Public facts (e.g., product/company names) can’t be copyrighted. Contributors' data remains public knowledge. We only claim copyright on our own original content and creative work. We also double-check all hints submitted and then create the complete data set.
Why Not Open Source?
We respect open-source ideals but saw other projects struggle with clutter/inefficiency. We opted for a focused, curated approach to keep the database simple and user-friendly which seems to work exactly as intended based on your and other users' feedback.
Why Not Non-Profit?
First of all, we started the project overnight and therefore opted for an existing structure. German non-profits require heavy paperwork and oversight - overkill for a small, revenue-free project that we already invest a lot of time in but want to limit the financial spending. Also: No donations = no risk of mismanagement, which unfortunately happens left and right in the non-profit world.
Therefore personally what I would care about as a user or contributor:
Our Intent
This is a passion project:
Hope this helps and can be used as a reference in the future as these valid questions came up before and we answered them via other channels in the past.
Although nobody asked here yet: We went with .net as whatever we thought was a catchy name was not available in the .eu domain space. We obviously would have chosen .eu if it was available but people registered all those domain names to then not use same as it often happens on the Internet.
I think you're confusing open-source with user-contributed. I understand from your message why you want to curate data instead of accepting and showing many people's contributions, but not why you wouldn't make the site's code publicly available.
Generally it would be possible for both the code and the data to be open source.
What would be the benefit of open source code?
A benefit would be code contributions that increase security. But as this is a simple website and not an encrypted messenger app people install or something similar, that is a minor concern and we are happy with managing that risk ourselves.
On the other hand, it further adds overhead with potentially no benefit and people who create similar projects (which there are lots of) have it even easier to create a (subjective) user-friendly and great solution. That is not something we want to support as this would further move us away from streamlining that database which leads to inefficiency.
We also noted that each project is quite reserved when it comes to streamlining benefits and there are lots of different communities with different opinions and approaches. We streamline it our way and people may use it or even contribute if they feel like it.
Also: https://www.trevorlasn.com/blog/open-source-is-where-dreams-go-to-die
What would be the benefit open open source data?
People could probably contribute quicker as it would open more approaches instead of submitting our form.
Other than that it would be a nightmare to streamline as people would have lots of opinions about which categories to add, how to structure them, what to add, what not to add, how to categorize entries. We simplify this by giving people the option to suggest whatever category, company and product they want. Then we have a suggestions database, can cluster, validate, collect more info, evaluate and then add it. For us that's a great way of doing same but it's obviously not a perfect way - yet it works very well for us and does not seem to stop people from contributing everyday.
Again, I'm talking about an open source application, not about user contributions.
The main benefit of this is be that people can know what your application does, and thus it increases trust in your application.
I don't see any downsides in this for you, unless you want to sell the web application and/or artificially minimise competition.
They stated the downsides: seeing other people creating their own version of buy-european.net, which kind of splinters the repository efforts
As someone who's regularly seeing people trying to create their own version of this community instead of contributing to it, I kind of see where they come from
This is not an application. It's a website that shows information. Therefore there is no need to trust the code - the same as 99.9% of all websites and your trusted developer will confirm same for you. If you don't want to use a website as you don't trust it because you don't have the source code, you probably have an interesting Internet experience.
So, again: The code will not be open sourced.
No need to open source the code, but would there be a way to have a backup person in case something happens to you?
There is a backup as we work on it as a team and more than one person has access to it. No need to worry.
Sounds good, thanks!
Hi Thanks for the thorough answer.
the rough imprint regulations are known. But by choosing a firm over a non-profit or a natural person (e.g. with Impressums-Service) will always raise the questions like: what you are planning for. A company is by definition profit-oriented. Also the personal risk with this project is not a good argument, any legal debate with a company would have you to change or delete an entry, before actual money is involved. On the other hand, if a company really wants to pull through and sues you, you are liable with company deposit (beschränkte Haftung). Anyhow, this isn't you being transparent, but ordinary legal stuff.
I believe this isn't quite right, as you can protect databases with re-arranged data or at least the effort put into re-arranging the database (bei geringer Schöpfungshöhe): https://www.ra-plutte.de/rechtlicher-schutz-von-datenbanken-alles-wichtige-im-ueberblick/ I don't know (or actually care) if that is already enough to for example sell a database.
Does that exclude going open-source in the future, e.g. when the curated database is mature enough? I mean, you could for example just release the data, without having people to edit it. But then again you invested so much time into vetting the user contributions, that this would be a hard choice to make.
There are also good counterexamples. Also the project could be moved to a an already existing non-profit organization, so there would be no money involved in founding. (E.V.s haben wir in DE ja schließlich genug :-). The proper ones all work with transparency reports to justify the money flow. I imaging being a company makes donations more cumbersome with the balance sheets and tax office.
All the answers don't sound like a long-term solution to me. It's' more like a pet project which can be dropped at any moments notice. Or even worse, if you decide to turn your page into an affiliate marketing gig or an ad-hell to cover the server costs...
Yea. Scalpers. I checked some domains (for a fediverse instance) by myself and found it quite agitating, what is already taken and should be sold for several 10K.
Thanks for the long response which I quickly skimmed.
To cut it short: We opted for this route, are very happy with the result, the feedback and the contributions. You may choose not to contribute or start your own project (as you already checked domains) but we are happy the way it is. The more overhead we generate (new structure, open source), the higher the possibility of failure and wasting money. Right now it's a slim and streamlined project that has little to no costs of running which means we can leave it running for decades to come (if there is still demand). The manual labour is still there but as it's a passion project, we want to invest that time but into the project and not into solving problems we don't face. In the end we are an efficient operation and not a German Behörde. :)
Good answers.
I never spoke about an own competing project. I just wanted to know what your long-term plans are, and obviously there are none. So we just have to use it as is and as long as it’s available. Fine withe me.
Long term: Proceed with improving the database as we do everyday and see where it takes us with minimum overhead to guarantee longevity. So far so good. :)
Ah. Also https://www.goeuropean.org/ makes a good job presenting their team. Is buy-european.net a one-man show and if the Truck factor (a regular term for dev gets hit by a truck) happens, everything will go to the bin?
As a general comment, go-european is managed by the mods of /r/buyfromEU, who
So they seem like they want to keep the control of the buyfromEU/buyeuropean movement
Also. That wasn't the question at all 😂
I stumbled upon this paragraph reading their Terms and Conditions, so seems relevant to mention
https://www.goeuropean.org/terms-conditions
Ah. My bad. They are referring to r/BuyFromEU . Mistaken the network for lemmy, where we have two entities. None of them seems to be affiliated, feddit.org's is for sure not.
Yeah no, that's definitely the /r/buyfromEU subreddit in this case
Could you please link the propper buyFromEU ? There are two different communities and feddit.org's is not associated with them.
What you mean by that?
Usually when I post on Reddit I promote Lemmy as a whole, not a specific community: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/comments/1j0xkqa/lemmy_as_an_alternative_to_reddit_using/
Answered below. I've mistaken the networks, thought you were referring to lemmy communities, but it was this legacy network indicated by an r/
Makes sense!