!Buyeuropean is meant to be more encompassing as to include more regions such as the Balkans, Switzerland, Iceland, Andorra, Norway, Moldova, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Ukraine and the UK. I have offered to invite the !buyfromeu moderator to the the team however they have not responded.

We have tried to contact the mod of this community but they haven’t been online / responsive since they went to sleep that one day when this was brought up. We wanted to discuss this.

And I get it, Russia is also European, but if we get into this argument people often forget that Switzerland, Norway, Iceland (to name a few countries) are not EU, and buyfromeu is not “EU/EEA/ETA” community. For example: we already have some nice posts recommending Ukrainian and Norwegian products.

Sunshine made the community before buyfromeu was made and we decided it’s ok to have EU specific community if someone wants specifically EU (although I think the reddit community r/buyfromeu is actually more about EEA/ETA) and we decided to add it to our sidebar.

And while UK has the whole Five Eyes spying coalition we also have problems inside EU with certain governments of EU countries using software such as Pegasus to spy on fellow EU citizens / officials and pushing for Chat Control. The community is not only about software (even though Lemmy has a huge tech community and it looks like the discussion is always about tech). We also have posts about stickers, clothes, microcontrollers, etc. I don’t trust Russian software at all but I also don’t blindly trust every bit of software from inside EU. There are regulations but no checks at the same level EU has for e.g. Food and medicine and product materials.

Now before someone comes in to say something about software and privacy regulations: software inside EU is NOT as regulated as physical products. We’ve got pretty amazing things like GDPR but this pales in comparison to what kind of checks and responsibilities are put on manufacturers and importers to deal with. I personally want stricter regulation and checks for software. Storing data is not as a sensitive topic as e.g. how much your laptop is allowed to interfere with the signals of your phone.

Again, discussion is good, and would be awesome if buyfromeu mod would return to lemmy (hope they are ok) to discuss.

Edit: fixed the text a bit.