Everyday apps
European photo and video sharing social networks
Share photos and video outside US platforms
A photo and video sharing social network is a platform built around visual posts: you publish images or short clips, follow other accounts, and comment on what shows up in your feed. Profiles, hashtags and reposts do the discovery work. The services here focus on pictures and video rather than text, and some of them federate with the wider social web.
Photos carry more than they appear to: faces, locations, timestamps, and a feed algorithm shaped around them. Pixelfed and Mastodon are open, federated projects where the server you join can be one operating under EU law, and BeReal is a French company. Anyone after a European alternative to Instagram should check whether their photos and follower list can be exported in bulk.
European options
| service | Country | Hosting | Open source | Free plan | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Pixelfed |
 Open source |
✓ | ✓ | ||
 Mastodon |
Open source |
✓ | — |
Pixelfed
Open source federated photo sharing network
Pixelfed is open source software for sharing images on a federated social network. It is not one platform: many servers run the Pixelfed software and exchange posts through the ActivityPub protocol, the same protocol Mastodon uses, so you can follow and like accounts that live on another server. The project was started by the Canadian developer known as dansup.
Open sourceOpen sourceFree planServices without verified European control
Kept here for transparency, but excluded from the European options and totals. How we classify services →
France
