Romania
The idea that consumer boycott is going to impede that unfolding political apocalypse of a regime is wishful thinking. However, even if somehow the US might return any soon to half-normal (any reasonable person should doubt it at this point), that half-normal should imply severe punishments for the complicity of big American corporations with DT’s regime, such as breaking these corporations apart. That alone should tell you EU can’t depend anymore on US big tech anymore.
That means you either have way more disposable income than people like me or you consume very little music. As an amateur music critic of sorts, I have to stream much more music than I could realistically afford. And I still remember the days when most music was only legally available as 30-second previews…
I’m well aware of that (I’m a Bandcamp user), but I’m concerned about the fact they rely on US servers. There are a lot of independent musicians who only want to publish on Bandcamp, not on Spotify and YT. In the extreme scenario where the POTUS might instate a great Internet firewall, we - active Bandcamp users - might end up dependent on VPNs. Let’s see if there’s going to be any European Bandcamp alternative.
Signal is on the long list of US surveillanced apps leaked by 404 Media.
People who are only now up in arms about Gates shedding hypocrisy on the climate crisis should look into the long history of abuses Microsoft have made on their way to near-monopoly, including the times when they lobbied and bribed governments, including here in Europe, to lock them and the educational systems into the Microsoft ecosystem. Instead of authorities saving money with Linux and FOSS in general, they spent public money on Windows and Office licenses! (Don’t get me started about how they shouldn’t have even been the benchmark for ECDL courses; having ECDL done should mean one can figure out how to use, say, a simple Linux distribution.)
Funny how the social media section doesn’t mention Facebook, which is by far more used here in Romania than Twitter/X, nor Instagram. For the latter the fediverse alternative is Pixelfed, for the former one could either use Friendica or make account on a Mastodon instance with higher character-limit - the one I use has the cap as high as 10,000 characters, so I can type long posts just like on Facebook, instead of just tweets. There is also Veklar, which claims to become soon a more GDPR-compliant alternative to fediverse, allowing private posts and messages; the problem is that it’s not decentralized, but its only server is based in France…
When it comes to browsers, one could look into Zen Browser (the developer seems to be from Spain), Librewolf (possibly US-connected, keep that in mind), Floorp (desktop-only; developers seem to be Japanese), and for Android browsing probably Iceraven or IronFox.
Signal? What about Threema and XMPP clients?
I am afraid Bandcamp is US-based…?
Or you could just use a Mastodon instance with a higher limit of characters, unless you really need intricate formatting and/or more than one picture.
Any European email provider who provides free tier and allows more than one personal account, just like Gmail? No problem for me if the amount of free storage is low.