Technically true, but there are still some implications of the location where a project is being developed out of, such as:
Regulations
Some countries mandate things like backdoors, or try to compel employees to produce data on their users. Session was actually a victim of this, where a government employee showed up at a developer’s home trying to see if they could get a backdoor built into Session. (Under the Assistance and Access Act, which allows them to compel any service provider to undermine encryption)
So they moved out of Australia.
Fiscal support/sanctions
Users generally might want to know if their donations are going to a country that they aren’t allowed to send money to because of sanctions, or they could also just have issues with funding that economy. For instance, I wouldn’t blame someone for preferring to fund software not developed in the USA for the time being, because they don’t want to do anything in any way to prop up the economy of America after what it’s been doing to the world. I say this as an American myself.
Not everything on AlternativeTo is FOSS, or always self-hosted
Many of the services there are not FOSS, and thus could be tied to corporations that have larger influence in markets (see my previous point about fiscal support to countries you don’t want to support) or could be more likely to be compelled to release user data.
There’s also the fact that many of these services can be paid for to have hosted, instead of you self-hosting them, even if they’re FOSS, and people again might not want to support the economy of a given country, or might have concerns that the regulations there could open them up to a higher risk of being spied on, even by passive collection techniques.
The US already has massive surveillance infrastructure to passively collect data on network connections within the country, so some people might prefer to keep any hosted data outside of the US, for example.
Technically true, but there are still some implications of the location where a project is being developed out of, such as:
Some countries mandate things like backdoors, or try to compel employees to produce data on their users. Session was actually a victim of this, where a government employee showed up at a developer’s home trying to see if they could get a backdoor built into Session. (Under the Assistance and Access Act, which allows them to compel any service provider to undermine encryption)
So they moved out of Australia.
Users generally might want to know if their donations are going to a country that they aren’t allowed to send money to because of sanctions, or they could also just have issues with funding that economy. For instance, I wouldn’t blame someone for preferring to fund software not developed in the USA for the time being, because they don’t want to do anything in any way to prop up the economy of America after what it’s been doing to the world. I say this as an American myself.
Many of the services there are not FOSS, and thus could be tied to corporations that have larger influence in markets (see my previous point about fiscal support to countries you don’t want to support) or could be more likely to be compelled to release user data.
There’s also the fact that many of these services can be paid for to have hosted, instead of you self-hosting them, even if they’re FOSS, and people again might not want to support the economy of a given country, or might have concerns that the regulations there could open them up to a higher risk of being spied on, even by passive collection techniques.
The US already has massive surveillance infrastructure to passively collect data on network connections within the country, so some people might prefer to keep any hosted data outside of the US, for example.