Check out https://f-droid.org/en/

https://makertube.net/ is the PeerTube instance that I’ve been using, and it’s been great.

Thanks for heads up! I’ve shared that link to my circles

Especially with switching.software, many alternatives are FOSS (and are labelled as such in their descriptions). I’ll edit the post text to highlight that.

But I also figured people in this community would be keen to know about other non-US alternatives that don’t yet have good FOSS counterparts.

Okay thanks, will do that in the future

I was playing this whole thing out in my head, and trying to justify the confidence of Trump and pals with such seemingly stupid moves. The only thing I can think of is that they believe that the money they will save (steal) from the government cuts, etc, will make up for the huge losses from the tariffs. And then they would have to believe that their internal AI development is at a point where they can overpower every other nation on earth, and so they don’t need those international relations anymore. I mean, technically every single Tesla in the world is a camera for Elon, and a huge percentage of internet traffic goes through US servers.

But then I think, even if they do have all of these advantages, China seems to be catching up pretty quickly, is allied with over 50% of the planet through BRICS, has protected itself from their technological expansion. This is not even including that most other countries in the world will probably want to distance themselves from the US if this keeps up.

Either I’m in denial, or it really is just Trump and Elon are being blinded by their overinflated egos.

Yeah I was wondering about that. Is there another sub that you would recommend?

Keep your eyes open for opportunities to empower those inside the US, as they fight from within.

Keep your eyes open for opportunities to empower Canadians and Mexicans, as they stay strong against the bullying.

It would be hilarious if they chose this moment to shut it down.

Calling on everyone else in the West and the global economy: keep your eyes open for opportunities to support the Canadian and Mexican people.

They are standing up to this corruption and fighting it where it stands. This is going to hit them hardest first, and they deserve our support.

Remember there have been worse times and you are descended mostly from people who survived them.

I love this

This is true. However, Proton’s big sell is that they can be trusted to be truthful about what is safe and what is not safe for your privacy.

I think given the context of the CEO’s personal bias towards current US Republicans, and given that those Republicans are aggressively anti-China, when Proton releases an article warning of a successful Chinese AI, and seemingly purposefully leaves out the part about how people are already running it securely, it starts raising some important questions about their alignment.

Given that you can download Deepseek, customize it, and run it offline in your own secure environment, it is actually almost irrelevant how people feel about China. None of that data goes back to them.

That’s why I find all the “it comes from China, therefore it is a trap” rhetoric to be so annoying, and frankly dangerous for international relations.

Compare this to OpenAI, where your only option is to use the US-hosted version, where it is under the jurisdiction of a president who has no care for privacy protection.

Yeah totally agree. He has proven to be one of the slimiest people on the scene. I mean, he is pretty much throwing his colleagues under the bus in this statement too lol

I’m not in the US (thinking of you guys everyday), but when I found myself feeling depressed by the direction of big tech, I realized that open-source and the Fediverse was the healthy and exciting way forwards. It was the one thing that felt like I remember the internet feeling like in the late 90s. I think you are spot on. It is the only way that democracy can survive in tech.

Sorry for confusion guys - here’s the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ieonxv/comment/maa0dcx/

Sorry for confusion guys - here’s the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ieonxv/comment/maa0dcx/

Ah interesting - cheers for sharing!

OpenAI was started to be as open as possible, and to prevent the kinds of capitalism-driven Closed-AI development that they have now themselves become.

My personal opinion is that closed AI systems are only good if the owners are trustworthy. And in the long-run, no single owner can be trusted. There are risks with letting everyone copy and customize AI, however the worse danger is that the power gets too centralized with one single company.

Open-Source in AI usually posted to HuggingFace instead of GitHub: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1