A little bit off-topic, but regarding this (sarcastic) quote:
> Europeans can’t do web and mail. There is absolutely no provider here who can do such complicated tasks.
We really can't, though. Because it's not just web and mail, it's Cloudflare and Google Workspace. There just are no EU alternatives for this. There just aren't. You can do parts of it, of course, but if you're running a business, you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare and Google Workspace alternative.
This is a real problem and I wish there were more real alternatives to services like these. Even Proton, which arguably replaces parts of Google Workspace, isn't even EU-based.
There is Nextcloud which is not only eu-based but open source as well. You choose what parts you run but it competes with most of workspace and office 365 (everything but the arguably obscure stuff*). I use all three (g-workspace, office 365 and nextcloud) and I strongly prefer nextcloud excluding my private preference of open source - even more so from an administrative perspective (fuck the workspace admin pages, they causes me so much trouble)
*except email-server which although easy to add on trough stalwart or external email provider is technically not part of the nextcloud ecosystem (webmail is however)
I don't know what you're smoking if you prefer Nextcloud over Google Workspace from an admin point of view, but hey, good for you.
But no, Nextcloud is not comparable to Google Workspace. Not as a user (their office web implementation is spotty at best, constantly crashes and disconnects; their calendar, meeting and chat apps are barebones; the clients regularly corrupt files or have issues syncing, etc.), and definitely not as an administrator: You have to constantly deal with manually updating the instance, re-enabling "incompatible" apps for some reason, deal with the updater taking 4 hours to download the zip file because their servers are overloaded again, updating the database server or PHP version because it will soon no longer be supported, etc. How is that better than having to navigate the Google Workspace admin interface every few months?
Proton is Swiss. That’s part of the CEE. It’s like Norway, EU-adjacent. They are part of a lot of the agreements and their laws track the EU closely where it matters. It makes sense to include in a lot of discussions surrounding sovereignty.
> you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare
The EU has multiple level 1 network operators that would be ideally positioned to build an alternative to Cloudfare if it was truly required. It’s not like they start from zero.
because the CEO of a company based on a different continent got suckered into believing Trump's campaign promises, which were mostly pretty decent... you're now doubting wherever the company he's the CEO of actually wants to monitor it's users?
I mean it was obvious that Trumps administration was gonna be spicy to say the least - but their messaging was most definitely way closer aligned to the working man vs the campaign Harrises team cooked up.
I wouldn't fault him at all, he likely just watched a Trump clip and posted his comment without any deeper meaning.
He definitely shouldn't have made that comment, but everyone makes the occasional not particularly well thought out statement... And he's a human too - and self aware enough to have other people/his employees overrule whatever he personally wants to say.
I'm not a proton user myself though. I believe the clients are the only parts that are open source, and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned. But I'm not particularly informed about proton either, so ymmv.
If a CEO of a company like Proton is that gullible that he falls for someone like Trump (IN 2025!), I have even less hope for my data being in secure hands.
> and a closed source backend thats security oriented is an oxymoron as far as I'm concerned.
Exactly. You're basically just trusting that this guy will always make the right decisions. I remember being in the same boat with Google. Don't be evil and all that.
Wow, that looks surprisingly interesting. How come I have never heard of them before, given that they apparently are around for more than 20 years? Have you used their services? Are they any good?
There's decent companies doing web and mail here. Most of them don't have a global CDN but for digital sovereignty that's not really an issue. Putting servers in other jurisdictions means they are vulnerable to local laws.
And also, you have to start somewhere. And the American companies often employ business practices we frown on here. Like Google datamining their users. Microsoft linking their services together and abusing their market position. Meta pirating to train their AIs.
Without those things the services will be more expensive, but they'll also be more honourable. I see a lot of people really defeatist these days "why care about privacy because you have none anyway" and this is mostly because of American companies.
https://mailbox.org is hosted entirely in Germany and, at least in my experience, has been absolutely rock solid. It's also very affordable for private use. No Google, no AWS, no Cloudflare.
(I'm not affiliated with them, just a happy customer.)
Yeah, I'll use Tuta if I want an email service that I can't use IMAP with, and then I still have to find a replacement for the 95% of other services Google Workplace offers.
It's not a matter of technical limitations, it's EU regulation and laws that make it so expensive to run that the margins are not enough.
Large actors can do it because they have other revenue sources, and they have resources to deal with the legal matters.
I am not saying regulations are bad, they are not, but every paragraph takes a small piece of the cake. And the cake is not infinite, so at a certain point people will go away because "I earn more on doing something else".
>t's EU regulation and laws that make it so expensive to run that the margins are not enough.
Not exactly. The EU regional market fragmentation and domestic protectionism of each country is a way bigger nerf to scaling tech companies domestically.
That's why all EU tech unirons aim straight for the US to sell their products/services there first, and only once they reach escape velocity there, then open themselves to EU customers.
the moment Google launched Gmail with free 1GB inbox many years ago the groupware suite market effectively died, the only other real player is Microsoft.
and likely Google/MSFT will deploy a copy here ran without direct interference from the US, and it'll probably chug along until the first really big lawful intercept disagreement (but there are a bunch of "mutual legal assistance treaties" so it'll take a while, and by then AI will eat us for paperclip NFTs anyway)
So by that logic all VPS providers are just a money grab because you can run your software yourself for “free” without having to pay for that artificial construct these greedy people call “compute?”
I don’t understand your point. You’re using a resource. You’re wasting time on the GPU of someone else. That chunk is called a token. And that’s what you’re being billed.
While that’s true of course, I find that a bit of a harsh conclusion. Yes, that’s the end result for any greedy company in a world without regulation.
But you can make that case for most business models. Restaurants? They’ll all eventually turn into fast food chains, because our human lizard brain appreciates fat and sugar more than actually good meals.
Gaming? Let’s just replace it all with casinos already. Loot boxes are just gambling anyways.
There’s absolutely a market for proper social media that’s actually social. It’s just that companies are way too greedy currently.
As I replied in else where here, I do not run any Apple Services on my Mac hardware. I do on my iDevices though, but that's a different topic. Again, I could be the edge case
But if you're being pedantic, I meant Apple SaaS requiring monthly payments or any other form of using something from Apple where I give them money outside the purchase of their hardware.
If you're talking background services as part of macOS, then you're being intentionally obtuse to the point and you know it
Literally no piece of software is bug-free. Not one. What are you talking about? Of course it’s impossible to test all inputs, because there’s going to be inputs that you can’t even convince of at the time of designing. What if your application suddenly runs at 1000000x the intended speed because hardware improves so much? How do you test for that?
Yes it does. It ages. But even if it doesn't, my point still stands. Or are you insinuating that the engineers over at Intel, AMD and Apple don't know what they're doing, because clearly their CPUs aren't flawless and still have bugs, like Spectre/Meltdown.
It deteriorates, it doesn't change. The functionality is still there and no modern hardware deteriorates to a failing state before it gets obsolete. Yes, I am insinuating that the engineers at intel, AMD, apple and nvidia are incentivized to prioritize expedient solutions over developing more robust architectures, as evidenced by vulnerabilities like Spectre and Meltdown.
I don’t think it’s that easy. I’m sure Intel, AMD and Apple have a very sophisticated suite of “known working systems” that they use to test their new chips, and they still build in bugs that security researchers find 5 years later. It’s impossible to test and verify such complex designs fully.
There’s a difference between not knowing multiplication and just refusing any logical thinking at all. We already see this a lot in adults today. Many are just too lazy to turn on their brain, because it’s easier to call, ask on Reddit or whatever, even if it takes ten times longer than just doing the thinking yourself.
This is just the perfection of that. And it’s suuuuper scary, because it trains you to be a brain dead monkey that literally believes anything ChatGPT tells you. And we know how that’ll work out.
Well it’s obviously not hilarious in a „haha funny“ kind of way. It’s hilarious in a „I can’t believe this is real life“ kind of way. It’s a headline you’d expect to read on The Onion.
And I blame the EU for not making this the law. Just force everyone to adhere to the setting and be done with it. But no, instead we got this bullshit.
> Europeans can’t do web and mail. There is absolutely no provider here who can do such complicated tasks.
We really can't, though. Because it's not just web and mail, it's Cloudflare and Google Workspace. There just are no EU alternatives for this. There just aren't. You can do parts of it, of course, but if you're running a business, you can't waste endless resources on building your own internal Cloudflare and Google Workspace alternative.
This is a real problem and I wish there were more real alternatives to services like these. Even Proton, which arguably replaces parts of Google Workspace, isn't even EU-based.