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.

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

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.

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…?