For non-health reasons, I have used in the past now and then the magnifier and the text-to-speech assistant in Windows and had noticed they did not always work with all sites and apps and also the apps themselves had a significant negative impact on the OS performance. I haven’t tried these things on Mint Linux yet, but I would’ve thought hard to believe Linux is somehow even worse than Windows when it comes to accessibility. Also, that makes me feel like even this limited accessibility only exists for the sake of legal compliance… Ableism is a huge problem and, yeah, able people should be more woke about it.

Sorry, it was actually this: https://www.bertelsmann-stiftung.de/en/our-projects/reframetech-algorithmen-fuers-gemeinwohl/project-news/eurostack-a-european-alternative-for-digital-sovereignty

soon. But once the world runs out of oil, the climate is decimated, and population comes crashing down because of restrictive immigration laws, there will be a sharp curve to the left and pro-EU that could lead to more interest in federation.

Or

This. Also, throw in the mix a backlash against nationalists abusing the cultural power void that might appear if both the US and the UK are collapsing - including the media industries -, the soft power of English declines, and instead of mass adoption of Mandarin in the stead of English we might try again Esperanto (which might not be the perfect universal language, but it could be perfect for Europeans).

Explain please? I’m uncertain about the heart of where you’re coming from

Globalism is such a weasel word. Esperanto-speaking cosmopolitans and tax-dodging capitalists are usually not the same. Then again, the far-right demonized even Esperanto back in the past century and might do it again if people took it seriously.

Check out rule #4. The server is based in Germany.

Android and Linux

Some of the issues with accessibility in Linux seem to come down to FOSS developers not willing to take an extra mile complying with accessibility standards, others have to do with how the big corporations have much more resources for it. Sadly, that seems to be the situation - I am surprised myself to learn there’s much to be improved in this department.

who gives a fuck if they dont sell in EU

They sell in some countries of the EU, but yeah, they don’t serve the entire EU.

Without Spotify, many Europeans will go back to piracy.

Their catalogue isn’t visible even if you are in a supported country? Ouch. I hate how Qobuz keeps coming up in these threads, but they still don’t serve even Eastern Europe, let alone Global South countries - I don’t want to listen just to classical and jazz.

InfinityFree are based in the Netherlands, though at one point at least they were using US servers. It seems like the best solution for free hosting by far.

Update: Since I’ve opened the thread, I’ve also found out Mailo and other providers do not even allow forwarding on their free tier! Just when I was about to throw in the towel, I discover in a Reddit thread someone mentioning a site called murena.io - turns out they do have free forwarding and a more than decent free tier - apparently, they’re tied to Nextcloud, which explains all the features besides the e-mail… Done a few verification emails, now let’s see if there’s no problem moving forward, what does puzzle me is that, upon signing up, the terms of use were pretty vague - it’s not clear whether they allow multiple mailboxes for one person - and then it seems to be inaccessible once you are signed in. Guess I’ll wait for a bit before opening multiple accounts and switching all my stuff, but so far murena.io looks promising!

We can’t switch provider or even supplied speed as the addresses would be gone and all we find are offers with aliases. So I am stuck there.

Thank you, I had decided for now to sign up to Mailo, who allow multiple aliases and accounts, however they have one maddening policy: when making free account, they said you’re not allowed for an “initial period” (they don’t mention for how long, I wonder if it is 30 days!) to receive verification e-mails from third party services, and that they can terminate account at any time if they think it was made solely for verification e-mail - again, a dread I didn’t have to fear back on Gmail.

I wanted to sign up to mail.de, but I got blocked with the message: “Since the spam rate from the network you are using is above average, your access to our pages has been blocked” - I’m using a mobile phone IP, this problem only ever happened to me once when logging into Wikipedia, but nowhere else.

They don’t allow multiple accounts.

I don’t have much programming knowledge, however at this point I’m grateful if I can at least download my FB data - I haven’t tried it yet and, honestly, I’m afraid they might ask for my gov ID. I never wanted to do that, as they tried to when my account, where my main name was my pen name, got busted for “fake name”. Funnily, they didn’t ask for ID anymore when I inputted my legal name! I hate them for doing that - but now I also hate Bluesky for suspending my freshly started alt account and asking for ID via email - which is just bonkers and discourages me from sticking long term to Bluesky. Which sucks cause right now there’s a lot more activity on Bluesky than on even Mastodon, as far as I can tell.

Not supported in my EU country (Romania)! I am so not going to use a VPN just to access my email, it’s ridiculous.

The last poster says: “I found a roundabout way to go at it by transfering the posts to wordpress, I’ll figure it out from there :)” I would have liked more info on that, though I’m afraid there would still be a catch - I don’t use Wordpress anymore and never was a power user, so I’m not sure it would be possible on a free tier to stash an entire Facebook archive on a Wordpress page - and then what about importing it into the fediverse? There should be a guide for this somewhere.

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.

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.