In my opinion replacing US Big Tech with European alternatives is bullshit unless they are also free software. Many European alternatives who started in Europe later moved to the US when they got big for better access to capital etc. It's like moving from Twitter/X to Bluesky only to see its enshittification 10 years down the line.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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Re enshitification that’s my thinking about LLMs right now. The managed chat-services offer nice UX… now… but surely at some point it will be crap and I’ll have to start self-hosting anyway… so why not jump to the last step right away and see how it goes. I can always revert if homemade solution turns out disastrous.
Also, if I’m making an effort to ditch comfortable product already, it’s only a little bit more effort to jump on the open source bandwagon rather than another corporate train.
While I agree with you, there is an issue with some services that have no free alternative (that I know of at least). Take the email or vpn services, do you know a real FOSS alternative? Or hosting services, any FOSS service?
That's a good question: I don't mean that 100% of their stack should be FOSS but
- Most of their "code", or their core offering, should be FOSS. For instance, Codeberg is powered by free software (Forgejo), in addition to being hosted in Europe.
- More importantly and inclusive of the first point, they should adhere to FOSS ethos: users should be able to export their data easily in a standard format, federate with other instances running compatible software, and so on. For instance, Bluesky is free software implementation of free AT Protocol, but Bluesky is also the only provider (instance) of that service. There is an effort named "Free Our Feeds" who is looking to raise 4 million dollars to setup a second instance while Mastodon has 200+ instances alone listed on its website. :)
I’m wondering how many more platforms will emerge 😂