Overview:
The community to discuss buying European goods and services.
Rules:
Be kind to each other, and argue in good faith. No direct insults nor disrespectful and condescending comments.
Do not use this community to promote Nationalism/Euronationalism. This community is for discussing European products/services and news related to that. For other topics the following might be of interest:
Include a disclaimer at the bottom of the post if you're affiliated with the recommendation.
No russian suggestions.
Feddit.uk's instance rules apply:
Useful Websites
General BuyEuropean product database: https://buy-european.net/ (relevant post with background info)
Switching your tech to European TLDR: https://better-tech.eu/tldr/ (relevant post)
Buy European meta website with useful links: https://gohug.eu/ (relevant post)
Benefits of Buying Local:
local investment, job creation, innovation, increased competition, more redundancy.
European Instances
Lemmy:
Basque Country: https://lemmy.eus/
๐ง๐ช Belgium: https://0d.gs/
๐ง๐ฌ Bulgaria: https://feddit.bg/
Catalonia: https://lemmy.cat/
๐ฉ๐ฐ Denmark, including Greenland (for now): https://feddit.dk/
๐ช๐บ Europe: https://europe.pub/
๐ซ๐ท๐ง๐ช๐จ๐ญ France, Belgium, Switzerland: https://jlai.lu/
๐ฉ๐ช๐ฆ๐น๐จ๐ญ๐ฑ๐ฎ Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Lichtenstein: https://feddit.org/
๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: https://sopuli.xyz/ & https://suppo.fi/
๐ฎ๐ธ Iceland: https://feddit.is/
๐ฎ๐น Italy: https://feddit.it/
๐ฑ๐น Lithuania: https://group.lt/
๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: https://feddit.nl/
๐ต๐ฑ Poland: https://fedit.pl/ & https://szmer.info/
๐ต๐น Portugal: https://lemmy.pt/
๐ธ๐ฎ Slovenia: https://gregtech.eu/
๐ธ๐ช Sweden: https://feddit.nu/
๐น๐ท Turkey: https://lemmy.com.tr/
๐ฌ๐ง UK: https://feddit.uk/
Friendica:
๐ฆ๐น Austria: https://friendica.io/
๐ฎ๐น Italy: https://poliverso.org/
๐ฉ๐ช Germany: https://piratenpartei.social/ & https://anonsys.net/
๐ซ๐ท Significant French speaking userbase: https://social.trom.tf/
๐ต๐ฑ Poland: soc.citizen4.eu
Matrix:
๐ฌ๐ง UK: matrix.org & glasgow.social
๐ซ๐ท France: tendomium & imagisphe.re & hadoly.fr
๐ฉ๐ช Germany: tchncs.de, catgirl.cloud, pub.solar, yatrix.org, digitalprivacy.diy, oblak.be, nope.chat, envs.net, hot-chilli.im, synod.im & rollenspiel.chat
๐ณ๐ฑ Netherlands: bark.lgbt
๐ฆ๐น Austria: gemeinsam.jetzt & private.coffee
๐ซ๐ฎ Finland: pikaviestin.fi & chat.blahaj.zone
Related Communities:
Buy Local:
Continents:
European:
Buying and Selling:
Boycott:
Countries:
Companies:
Stop Publisher Kill Switch in Games Practice:
Banner credits: BYTEAlliance
Funny how when Visa and MasterCard cut off cross-border payments in Russia โ by their own initiative, without any laws forcing them to do that โ Westerners all cheered. Then three years later it finally hit them as to what that means.
Meanwhile Russia was building their own payment system since 2014, and it was already working nationwide before '22, so people just got a new card if they wanted, and the system currently dominates the country's market.
We need an open platform for payments, not just another centralized solution.
I think the biggest issue with this is that payment systems require a certain level of trust, that's hard to achieve in a decentralized system.
How decentralized does it need to be? Is a central issuer (like GNU Taler) acceptable?
Source? You only linked an image
Oopsie, sorry about that. The link apparently disappeared when I added the picture. I changed it back again.
It is reported in several Swedish news outlet, but the original source was an interview on a public service radio channel that was aired this morning: https://www.sverigesradio.se/avsnitt/riksbankschef-erik-thedeen-att-skapa-europeiska-betalsystem-ar-viktigt-pa-grund-av-den-geopolitiska-situationen
We need digital euro. There are advances, but it's still going too slow.
Yup. This is the solution to US control of cashless transactions. The sooner the digital euro can be agreed upon, standardized and rolled out at the EU level, the better.
As a Romanian in a country still outside the Eurozone, I hope there's provisions to allow us to use it for RON transactions while our economy is still too much of a mess to join.
Doesn't this open up privacy issues?
Yes. They compare it to cash, but the FAQ specifies
[Payment Service Providers] would be able to identify users for the purpose of compliance with anti-money laundering rules.
Better systems include blinded signatures and ring signatures.
The amount of times I had my rent/bills bounce because my bank got frozen from anti money laundering AI bullshit that flags every single thing. God forbid you can afford to pay a friend's car insurance
@DreasNil all IT infrastructure
is too dependent on the US. Good that people are waking up to some degree
I completely agree!
It exists, it is called Wero. Check with your European bank if they support it. Many do.
Haven't seen any shops supporting no Wero though, whereas you can visa and MasterCard in virtually any shop in the world.
A LOT of catching up to do, before it could actually be used realistically by people. Maybe banks can use it internally.
Fair point, however, it is happening. They already outline the payment process and it seems simple enough to implement, at least for payment by smartphone.
Scan QR code with your banking app, confirm payment, done.
The scanning of the QR code is unfortunately a bigger issue than one can imagine. Takes slightly longer and is slightly more complicated than just blipping your credit card. Enough so to dissuade most people to use it.
It exists, it is called GNU Taler
GNU Taler is developed as part of the GNU project for the GNU Operating System
the GNU Operating System
Lol
I missed the joke here
Does anyone.. actually.. use it? I installed it some time ago and got stuck at not knowing what to do next
You need a bank that supports it, we use it in the family for money gifts to the kids. Haven't seen a commercial application so far.
I see Taler brought up, and it always intrigues me.
What is the current state of it? With the app it looks like I can add a bank potentially but there are no payment service providers populated.
Does it currently function in a way I could transfer money between myself and a friend?
Here is another readme about the state: https://www.taler.net/en/ngi-taler.html
Some banks, mainly cooperative banks, already work with it. But it's again one of those systems that doesn't make them money, so I suspect it will die a slow death.
It should work. The stable release was, I think, a few months ago? And it has been operating in Switzerland since the stable release: https://taler-ops.ch/
Wero is not widely supported yet, it's not even finished yet, it doesn't have feature parity with existing solutions. Compared to its predecessor, Giropay, it's also rather intransparent, in a "just trust our app, bro" kind of way, with little in the way of open standards.
It needs support from every single bank to work (in stark contrast to PayPal, btw), and that support requires quite a lot of development and maintenance effort on the part of the bank. Parent poster (BarHocker) said many European banks already support it, but the practical reality is most of them don't, and largely didn't have any plans to, either. The number of supporting banks is artificially inflated by the fact that the German Volksbanken/Raiffeisenbanken and the Sparkassen, respectively are technically hundreds of small regional banks.
This requirement to have direct support from the individual banks is, the way I see it, the main reason why Giropay failed. If Wero has the exact same problem, I don't see why it would succeed where Giropay did not.
I do still hope for it, though.
I'm afraid you're wrong. We've had something very similar to Wero in Sweden since 2012 - it's called Swish. It helps, but it unfortunately doesn't get rid of the need for visa and mastercard.
Wero has a specific functionality. He is not talking necessarily about consumer-facing systems here. For european banks there are other systems and infrastructure that need to be thought about.
I thought that there was already an EU payment system in the pipeline, due to roll out completely in 2026? Or did I make that up.... ๐ค
EDIT - Wero - https://sbs-software.com/insights/wero-europe-payment-race/
And it is tied to a single bank account and can only be used by the app where the account is from. And only on mobile. And most banks want you to use your phone number for it. No thanks.
Yeah, great start!
Digital euro, but it's postponed for a year or something like that.
There is a reason why Europe is not the leader in software development.
An European team gave my south American office branch a piece of software that follows crappy programing guidelines.
The local team from my city is fixing that shit.
That's not a European thing, that happens everywhere in the world, I would blame your south American office branch for accepting it without checking or trying it first.
Wero!
For years I am watching the cryptocurrency Nano ($XNO). As many cryptocurrencies, it is free / libre / open source, decentralized (belongs to no nation). But it is also totally without fees (I haven't believed it but checked and it is really true), super fast (full confirmation under 1 second) and super energy efficient (on par with usual bank card transaction). And the guys beyond it are there for the original goal of crypto - enabling independent money usage - while also explicitly distancing themselves from speculative "investing".
But it is not yet "commercial grade", so big companies are for now not encouraged to use it for high throughput use cases. And it is also not yet widely accepted by vendors, and widely owned by paying customers. Basically the chicken and egg problem...
Nano had centralized issuance with CAPTCHAs administered by a private organization. This means they could have given themselves >51% of the total supply at no cost by lying.
It's unreasonable to expect the people of Europe to trust crypto bros that much.