Insightful (or probably: depressing) website shows the Dutch dependency on US tech for digital services like mail and websites. zijnwealautonoom.nl (‘are we autonomous yet’). Red button more clearly marks the US part of it.

In the Netherlands, they are mainly used as a means of transport (or rather: racing) for underage teenagers (12-14) in general (and migrants and young people with a lower level of education in particular), as long as they are not yet allowed to ride a moped and therefore happy to use these fatbikes to circumvent the rules for mopeds.

It might well be possible these ‘bikes’ are a gift when buying vapes, or the other way around, don’t know, but somehow they mainly occur in combination with each other.

In the Netherlands there’s now a useful dashboard on the depressing state of US tech dependency of government agencies, education, healthcare and a group of large companies.

zijnwealautonoom.nl (‘are we autonomous yet’)

There’s still a long way to go.

There are a lot of European alternatives already. Ok, maybe many of them aren’t exactly as smooth or marketed as the billion-dollar companies of the US, but many are still pretty good. The main problem is not the absence of good European tech, the main problem is a lack of funding (due to the absence of a common internal market), and a lack of enough marketing power. And a surplus of ‘IT-managers’ that pretend to be the expert but don’t know there’s life outside the googlosphere.

Some useful lists of alternatives:

https://buy-european.net/en/alternatives

european-alternatives.eu

euroalternative.co

Could have been a incorrect link, my fault. Removed the www, and it seems to work properly now

In the Netherlands someone made a nice (or maybe I should say: depressing) dashboard (still beta) for the US dependency of government agencies, schools, healthcare and companies: zijnwealautonoom.nl (‘are we autonomous yet’). Red button highlights the enormous extent to which most Dutch organisations behave like a digital colony of the US, for example screenshot shows education.

Yeah, that tweet aged well 🤦‍♂️

So, stop buying ANYTHING from the USA. For a quick start: buy-european.net

european-alternatives.eu

euroalternative.co

www.goeuropean.org

https://help.x.com/en/forms/account-access/deactivate-or-close-account

American and owned by American capitalists might be a big disadvantage, but that doesn’t automatically equals it to the nazi deepfake porn platform for foreign troll armies that X has become. Europeans better move to mastodon, but still moving to Bluesky is way better than staying at X. Bluesky is basically similar to X a decade ago. No sane and intelligent person in the world can deny that Twitter a decade ago was way better than C today.

Great moment for a bunch of high profile decent VIP’s to make a video endorsing Peter Magyar

Might be true in some cases, but up to date news becomes pretty useless when covered under a large amount of fake news.

Understandable, especially when there might be a lot of links to the profile around the internet. However, in that particular case it’s still possible to delete all content, contacts / follows, followers, and profile images and descriptions etcetera, make the profile private, and give it some semi-permanent dead existence, or delete if a year later or so.

Initially with the aim of finding out which one I prefer, and to better be able to help other Linux starters like my 75yo father when they have questions. Additional benefit: if I damage one of the distro’s into some severe state of unusability (like I did yesterday per accident), I can still use the other distro😀

Financially, or when their customers require so, or when damaging to their image. At least the latter two are quite influenceable.

You could tell him that X isn’t cool anymore. That Bsky (or mastodon) is the new Twitter, but without the 90% trolls and without the advertisements every other 3 posts

I wouldn’t. Not because I don’t think it’s a good idea, but I want to let them see that specifically X became a disgusting fascist deepfake childporn abyss. Adding fb as well, increases the risk they don’t quit any of them, because it might give them the illusion my message says more about me ‘being anti social media’ rather than about X in particular.

Since few weeks I’m replying to all mails with X in the footer (newsletters as well as email signature of corporate mails) to tell them it would be great if they stop promoting this crappy outlet. Concise, polite and motivated.

From roughly half of them I didn’t get a reply yet. From the other half, a MAJORITY reacts positive. We all should know, the MAIN reason most organizations are still there, is because someone decided so in 2010 (!). They never thought about it afterward, because their audience / customer ‘never asks for that’.

Be. That. Customer / Reader. Who. DOES. Ask. For. That.