I’ve seen many threads suggesting products but they often don’t mention FOSS projects, which should always be preferred to corporate software. With FOSS you are already boycotting capitalism, on either side. Free and Open Source ignores borders and shouldn’t be categorized in nationalist terms, no matter where some of the maintainers happen to live.
From a purely “vote with your wallet” standpoint it doesn’t make sense, because there’s no money paid. However, one might worry about data/information getting in the hands of a fascist/compromised government. So I think people should judge this themselves case by case.
I think the important part is about who is running the server, rather than who made the software
The fediverse is interesting in that context because each instance can decide where they set up the infrastructure or how they process data / requests. The same applies to self hosting
I saw an article that outlined which country each fediverse platform “originated” from, such as Canada for Pixelfed and Germany for Mastodon. That’s fun to know about, but otherwise not important to users compared to the instances themselves
At most it might speak to which laws will govern the project itself, but even then someone can fork a project that goes astray
People should pay for foss. Donations are oftentimes welcome
I mean, any FOSS project from anywhere could be being used by a fascist government or corporation, to be fair. That’s literally one of the very serious and real downsides of FOSS. It’s able to be used for good or ill.
I mean, it can easily be argued that the US corporate technology class has benefited far more from FOSS than end-users worldwide.
Amazon’s EC2 especially:
Amazon leveraged FOSS to create their own successful closed-source offshoot. AWS pretty much runs the web. Amazon… is not a good company.
That being said, the US has chosen to be isolationist, whether all of its citizens agree with it or not. Having less of a presence on the international stage, including in the FOSS world, is simply a consequence of isolationism. So boycotting US FOSS is likely to happen in some ways on purpose, and in some ways just from diminished international respect and involvement.