Europe is moving decisively away from U.S. tech giants toward open-source alternatives, driven by concerns over digital sovereignty and reliability of American companies[1]. At the 2025 OpenInfra Summit Europe, industry leaders emphasized that this shift isn’t about isolation but resilience.
“What we’re really looking for is resilience. What we want for our countries, for our companies, for ourselves, is resilience in the face of unforeseen events in a fast-changing world. Open source allows us to be sovereign without being isolated,” said OpenInfra Foundation general manager Thierry Carrez[1:1].
This transition is already happening. The German state Schleswig-Holstein has replaced Microsoft Exchange and Outlook with open-source email solutions. Similar moves have been made by the Austrian military, Danish government organizations, and the French city of Lyon[1:2].
European companies are stepping up to fill the gap with open-source alternatives, including:
- Deutsche Telekom’s Open Telekom Cloud
- OVHcloud’s sovereign cloud services
- STACKIT and VanillaCore’s European-based offerings[1:3]
The movement gained additional momentum when the European Commission appointed its first executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security, and democracy in 2024[1:4].
Yeah Canadians are so serious about boycotting the US, except everyone still uses Mastercard, Visa, Android, Google, AWS, Microsoft, Linkedin, Indeed, FB, IG, etc. etc. They can’t even press the free delete account button, what a great boycott! Finally after almost a year only the EU is just beginning to discuss digital sovereignty.
It will happen though everything takes time and effort. Wonder what a Mastercard/Visa open source alternative would even look like though. Facebook alt I am debating making myself with a team of interested people but building it out to see how it would be done
Open Source Alternatives:
There’s pixelfed for an Instagram alternative, which is based on the activitypub protocol. If flashes is built on bluesky I don’t think it will make much of a difference if the protocol is controlled by a company.
I completely forgot about Pixelfed. Haven’t tried it yet any clients you would recommend for it?
I was trying to look up this discord alternative you mentioned - Stoat, but only found water simulation software, any link?
Here is their alternativeto.net info page: https://alternativeto.net/software/revolt-chat/about/ (Great website to find open source alternatives to other stuff as well)
And here is their actual website: https://stoat.chat/
Well, you can’t expect the whole net of dependency to be torn down that quickly when it took decades to be established. Especially if you want a somewhat normal life.
Even before the latest acceleration into fascism I kept looking for alternatives of almost everything I use and the pain is something I’ve just got used to when it started with switching to Linux only over 20 years ago. Of course I still get envious when iPhone users just quickly AirDrop some pics, so I get why it’s not always easy to switch to alternatives.
But alternatives exist. Exploring them has become a lot more mainstream and they get more funding and support.
When you and your wife send pics over KDE Connect instead is a powerful moment. Still requires one phone to connect to the other over hotspot or be on the same network at home, but its slick otherwise.
Wait, KDE connect can go straight from one phone to another? That sounds awesome. I know it’s a great piece of software, but that makes it even greater.
Yep, just make sure to set the permissions so you’re not sending notifications to the other phone (if it’s someone else’s) or allowing remote control of yours. Just enable file sharing or whatever you want, and maybe allow them to do the find my phone ring thing.
What do Canadians have to do with European tech sovereignty? Why are you trying to hijack this thread?
And for Canadians, what realistic alternatives are you suggesting for everything you’ve listed?
If you want to be taken seriously, start by proposing an actionable plan.
I don’t use Android, Google, Linkedin, Indeed, or FB, and I don’t even know what IG is. I didn’t bother to close the accounts. Canada has no credit card yet. I paid for MS software before US GOP went nuts.