Best European Alternatives to Facebook
Looking for a European alternative to Facebook? Meta's Facebook is the world's largest social network, but it's known for extensive data collection, targeted advertising, and privacy concerns. For individuals who value privacy and data sovereignty, European and decentralized alternatives offer compelling options.
We've curated the best privacy-focused social networking platforms from Europe. These alternatives provide meaningful social connections while respecting your privacy and keeping your data under your control.
How we rank these tools — 4-step process
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European ownership, verified
The company is headquartered and incorporated in the EU, EEA, the UK, Switzerland or Israel, and processes customer data in Europe or Israel. A US parent company disqualifies a tool from this page regardless of where its servers are.
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Category fit and hands-on review
What the tool actually does, who it suits, and where it falls short — checked against the vendor’s own documentation, changelog and pricing page rather than its marketing copy.
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Compliance and pricing check
GDPR posture, hosting location and the prices quoted on this page are verified against the vendor’s public pricing before publication, and re-checked when we revisit the category.
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Position on this page
Placement on this page can be paid, and that can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. It never buys a good review: a tool that fails the checks above is not here at any price, and payment does not change the shortcomings we write about. A vendor can ask us to correct a factual error — not to remove a criticism.
Vendors can pay for visibility on this page. It never changes what an entry says about a product, including the criticism, and we earn nothing when you click through to a vendor. Vendors can pay for more visibility, higher up on the review pages; it never affects which tools are listed. Editorial policy
Why Choose a European Alternative to Facebook?
No Tracking
No surveillance capitalism or behavioral tracking for advertising.
Decentralized
No single corporation controls your data or social graph.
No Ads
Clean experience without manipulative targeted advertising.
Open Source
Transparent code you can inspect, audit, and self-host.
Best European Alternatives to Facebook
We've curated the best privacy-focused social networks from European developers. Each alternative has been evaluated for privacy, features, and community health.
Mastodon
Decentralized social network built on open web protocols
Diaspora
Privacy-aware, distributed social network
Jodel
Anonymous hyperlocal feed tied to your city or campus, with Karma instead of profiles or followers
BeReal
French daily photo app: one two-minute dual-camera post a day, no filters, no follower counts
Yubo
French live-video app for meeting people by shared interests, with group rooms and age checks
HumHub
Open-source social network software from Munich, free to self-host or managed in EU data centres
Mobilizon
Federated, open source events and groups platform for communities, an ad-free alternative to Facebook Events
Hubzilla
Federated open source platform for social networking, groups, files and wikis with portable identity
JustBSocial
Small Dutch social network on open-source OSSN, with a chronological timeline, no tracking cookies
Key takeaways
- Two of Facebook's six functions have replacements on this page; Groups, Events, Marketplace and Messenger do not, because what makes them work is everyone already being there.
- The cost of leaving Facebook is reachability, not exposure — nothing you posted becomes safer, you simply stop being findable by people who assume you are.
- diaspora* is still maintained — release 0.9.1.0 arrived on 7 April 2026, almost two years after the one before it — and it is very small: around 66 pods and roughly 21,000 active users in September 2025.
- Mastodon began transferring ownership to a new European non-profit in January 2025, so the software that replaces your timeline is not owned by anybody who could sell it.
- Transfers of European Facebook data to the United States rest on the adequacy decision adopted on 10 July 2023, which means the old argument that they are unlawful no longer holds as stated.
Why people leave Facebook
Facebook is not one service. It is a timeline, a photo archive, Groups, Events, Marketplace and a login button that other websites use, all sitting behind a single account. People discuss leaving as though it were one decision. It is six, and they have wildly different answers.
This page has a genuine replacement for two of them: the timeline and the photographs. For Groups, Events and Marketplace it has nothing, and neither does anybody else, because what makes those work is that the whole town is already inside them. That is not a software problem and no amount of open source fixes it.
Which leaves the real reason people hesitate, and it is not privacy. It is reachability. Facebook is where the school parents coordinate, where the old colleague found you, where the invitation went. Deleting the account does not expose you to anything; it removes you from a directory that most of the people you know still consult.
- The account is a directory entry you did not agree to maintain Somewhere between 2008 and now, Facebook became the default way people locate each other. Nobody decided this and nobody can undo it locally. The consequence is that leaving is asymmetric: you lose contact with people who still assume you are findable, and they never learn that you are not. That cost falls entirely on the person who leaves.
- Groups and Events have no replacement and will not get one A neighbourhood group, a school year, a repair collective and a five-a-side league are coordination problems solved by everyone already having an account. Federated software can reproduce the features — posts, threads, attendance lists — and cannot reproduce the membership. Any page that lists a European tool as a Groups replacement is describing a feature set, not a functioning group.
- Marketplace quietly became the reason most accounts stay open For a large number of people the last active use of Facebook is selling a sofa. It works because the buyers are local and already logged in, and it displaced the classifieds sites in most European countries in about five years. There is no European equivalent that combines local reach with an existing account, and the honest answer is a national classifieds site, which is a different kind of product.
- Meta Platforms, Inc. decides what the archive is for Fifteen years of photographs, messages and life events sit in a product designed in Menlo Park, and transfers of European data out of the EEA now rest on the adequacy decision the Commission adopted on 10 July 2023 — a mechanism that is in force and under legal challenge at the same time. The point is not that anything unlawful is happening. It is that the rules covering your archive are decided several removes away from you and change without you.
What you have to replace, not just match
Split the account into its parts before you decide anything, because two of them move and four of them do not.
The timeline — posting what you are doing, reading what other people are doing — is replaceable, and Mastodon and Diaspora are the two ways of doing it. The photographs are replaceable, and Pixelfed is where they go.
Groups, Events, Marketplace, Messenger and the login button are not replaceable in any sense that survives contact with reality. The practical route most people take is to keep a stripped-down account for those, publish nothing on it, and move the part of their life that was public somewhere they would rather it lived.
The alternatives compared
| Position | Tool | Headquarters | Pricing | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| #1 | Mastodon | Germany | Free, community funded | EU (Germany) for the project; instances vary |
| #2 | Diaspora | Distributed | Free, open source | Depends on the pod you join |
| #3 | Pixelfed | Distributed | Free, open source | Depends on the instance you join |
| #4 | Jodel | Berlin, Germany | Free, ad-supported; no premium subscription tier published on jodel.com | EU (Germany) |
| #5 | BeReal | Paris, France | Free | EU (France), acquired by Voodoo |
| #6 | Yubo | Paris, France | Free to download and use; optional Yubo Power Pack and Yubo Elite Pack subscriptions (weekly, monthly or 3-month), priced per country and shown in the app at time of purchase | EU (France) |
| #7 | HumHub | Munich, Germany | Community Edition free under AGPLv3 and self-hosted; Professional Edition from €144/month with optional managed hosting at €36/month; Enterprise on request; 10% off for annual billing | EU (Germany) |
| #8 | Mobilizon | Caluire-et-Cuire, France (Kaihuri); Lyon, France (Framasoft) | Mobilizon is free software. Anyone can create an account on an existing public instance (examples listed on mobilizon.org include mobilizon.fr, Mobilizon.be, Mobilizon.nl, Mobilizon.ie, Mobilizon.it, Mobilisons.ch) or install their own instance from the documentation. The project site mentions professional hosting services via contact, with no public price list. Kaihuri is funded by donations and NLNet. | EU (France) |
| #9 | Hubzilla | Basel, Switzerland | The software is free and open source. You can self-host it or create an account on a public hub chosen from the public sites list. Prices of third-party hubs are set by their operators. The Hubzilla Association accepts membership and funds to support the project; no paid plan is listed on hubzilla.org. | Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA) |
| #10 | JustBSocial | Netherlands | eu-eea |
How each alternative compares to Facebook
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany) for the project; instances vary. Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the instance you join, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: People whose Facebook was mostly writing things, not keeping up with family
Mastodon is the substitute for the middle of Facebook: a place to write something, a feed of what other people wrote, replies underneath. If you strip Facebook of Groups, Events, Marketplace, tagging, birthdays and the friendship graph, what remains is close to what Mastodon does, and it does it without an advertising business anywhere in the design.
The structural difference is who the network is made of. Facebook is built on mutual friendship with people you know away from a screen, and every feature assumes it — birthdays, mutual friends, memories, tagging.
Mastodon is built on one-directional following organised around subjects, so the person you end up reading every day is usually someone you have never met who knows a great deal about something. For a Facebook user that is either a relief or a loss, and which one it is depends entirely on why you were there.
Governance is the other thing worth knowing. In January 2025 the project announced it was moving ownership of the name, the code and the assets to a new European non-profit, with the stated aim of making sure the platform cannot be owned by one person, and set out a target operating budget of €5 million for that year.
That is the opposite of the arrangement you are leaving, where one company holds everything and one shareholder structure decides what it becomes.
What Mastodon does better than Facebook
- No advertising and no engagement ranking, so nothing decides on your behalf which of your friends you stop seeing
- Ownership is moving to a European non-profit, where Facebook is a product line of a US corporation
- Your account can move between servers and take its followers with it, which no Facebook account has ever been able to do
- Open source under AGPL, so a server operator can be checked rather than trusted
- An EU-hosted instance keeps the account under GDPR with an operator you can write to and get an answer from
Where Mastodon is a step down from Facebook
- No Groups, no Events, no Marketplace and no photo tagging — four of the six things a Facebook account is used for
- No concept of mutual friendship, so the family-and-old-classmates half of Facebook has no shape here at all
- Finding people you already know is hard, because there is no global directory and no phone-number matching
- Far smaller, so the person you wanted to reconnect with is almost certainly not on it
- Choosing a server is a decision you have to make before you can start, which Facebook never asked of you
Standout against Facebook. It is the only option here where moving house is a supported operation: change server, keep your followers, and nobody has to be told twice.
- Which law reaches it. Depends on the pod you join. Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the pod, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR on EU-hosted pods.
Best for: A defined circle — a family, a club, an activist network — moving together
diaspora* started in 2010 with the argument Facebook has spent fifteen years being criticised for ignoring: that a social network should be a set of servers people choose, not a company's property. The design that came out of that argument still reads well. Posts support Markdown, hashtags and mentions work, photo sharing is built in, and Aspects let you decide at the moment of posting which part of your life is the audience.
It is fair to note that Facebook can do the audience part too. Custom friend lists exist and have for years. The difference is where the control sits: on Facebook it is buried behind a default of everyone, and the company that provides it also decides which of your friends the post is actually shown to. On a pod you run or trust, the audience you pick is the audience that gets it.
Now the size, because the rest of this only matters if anybody is there. Counts in late 2025 put the network between 29 and 66 active pods and between 274,000 and 325,000 registered accounts, with roughly 21,000 people active in a month.
Development continues at its own pace — 0.9.1.0 landed on 7 April 2026, a security and bug-fix release, almost two years after the one before it — but this is a network for taking a group you already have somewhere private, not for finding anyone.
What Diaspora does better than Facebook
- Per-audience sharing is part of posting rather than an option buried under a default of everyone
- A pod can be run by a family, a club or an association, so the network is a thing you host rather than a service you join
- No advertising, no profiling and nothing that ranks your friends against each other
- AGPL-3.0, and still shipping releases sixteen years after launch — 0.9.1.0 arrived on 7 April 2026
- An EU-hosted pod puts the whole thing under GDPR with an operator who is usually a person, not a department
Where Diaspora is a step down from Facebook
- Roughly 21,000 active users in a month, which is smaller than many individual Facebook groups
- Federates less completely with the rest of the network than the ActivityPub-native platforms do
- Development is slow, and the interface shows its age against anything Meta ships
- No Groups, Events or Marketplace, so it replaces even less of Facebook than Mastodon does
- If the pod you joined closes, your account closes with it, and small pods do close
Standout against Facebook. It is the one place where choosing who sees a post is the normal way to post, rather than a setting you have to remember exists.
- Which law reaches it. Depends on the instance you join. Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the instance, or self-hosted.
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. GDPR on EU-hosted instances.
Best for: People whose Facebook use is posting pictures rather than keeping up with anyone
Most people forget that Facebook is one of the largest photo archives ever assembled, and that a good share of their account is albums rather than status updates. Pixelfed is the European answer to that half: photographs and short video with collections, comments, hashtags and a profile, under AGPL-3.0, with official mobile apps since January 2025 and no advertising anywhere in it.
The distinction that decides whether it suits you is publishing against sharing. Publishing is putting a picture where anyone might see it and hoping some of them do. Sharing is twenty relatives looking at a christening. Pixelfed is built for the first and is a poor fit for the second, because it has no equivalent of a private album with a fixed audience and no tagging of people who are not on it.
For the family half, the honest recommendation is not a social network at all. A shared folder on European cloud storage does the job better, keeps the files, and does not require your aunt to understand what an instance is. Use Pixelfed for the work you would show a stranger, and keep the christening somewhere else.
What Pixelfed does better than Facebook
- No advertising business, so the photographs are not the raw material of an advertising profile
- Collections and a profile that reads as a body of work, where a Facebook album reads as a folder
- Self-hostable under AGPL-3.0, so your photo archive can live on a domain you own
- Federates with Mastodon and Diaspora, so a picture posted once is visible across the network without reposting it
- Official mobile apps since January 2025, which removes the excuse that this only worked in a browser
Where Pixelfed is a step down from Facebook
- No private album shared with a fixed list of relatives, which is what most Facebook photo use actually is
- No tagging of people, no anniversary reminders and no memories resurfacing
- Nobody you know is likely to be there, so the audience for family pictures is nobody
- Smaller and younger than Facebook by every measure, including how long it has survived
- Migrating fifteen years of albums is a manual job with no tool to do it for you
Standout against Facebook. It is the only entry here that treats a photograph as something you publish rather than something a feed decides whether to show.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Source code. Closed source, as Facebook is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: People who want an anonymous local feed for a campus or town, not a replacement for friends and family.
Jodel answers a question Facebook never asks: what is happening within a few streets of me right now. There are no profiles, no usernames and no follower counts, only a feed tied to a city or campus where anyone nearby can post. It replaces the neighbourhood-group habit, not the friend list, and nothing you post is attached to a name.
The Facebook graph is built on people you know offline, and every feature leans on it. Jodel inverts that: the audience is whoever shares your location, and Karma, earned through upvotes, is the only signal that follows a post. You cannot find an old colleague here, and nobody can find you, which is the point and also the limit.
It is run by The Jodel Venture GmbH in Berlin under the GDPR, and it is a single company's app, not software anyone can host. That keeps it closer to Facebook's centralised model than to Mastodon. It is free and ad-supported, and some analytics data still reaches US processors under standard contractual clauses.
What Jodel does better than Facebook
- No profiles, usernames or follower counts, so there is no social graph to be profiled
- Feeds are tied to a city or campus, which suits local questions better than a friends timeline
- Operated by a German company under the GDPR, where Facebook is run from the United States
- Free with no premium subscription tier published on its own pages
- Karma replaces an audience, so nobody ranks their friends against each other
Where Jodel is a step down from Facebook
- Centralised, with no self-hosting and no portable account
- Anonymity makes moderation harder than on named-account networks
- No Groups, Events, Marketplace or photo albums
- Some analytics and support data still reaches US processors under standard contractual clauses
Standout against Facebook. It is the only entry here where the audience is defined by where you stand rather than who you know.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France), acquired by Voodoo. Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. EU.
- Source code. Closed source, as Facebook is.
- Independently checked. GDPR.
Best for: People who used Facebook to show friends their day and want a smaller, calmer circle.
BeReal replaces the habit of posting what you did today, not the archive. Once a day, at a random time, every user gets two minutes to take a photo with both cameras. There are no filters, no likes and no public follower counts, and the previous day's posts disappear when the next notification arrives.
Facebook rewards a curated history: albums, memories, years of posts. BeReal deliberately does the opposite. Posts appear in chronological order from your friend list, you cannot see friends' posts until you have shared your own, and the only record is a private Memories calendar. For some people that is relief, for others it means losing everything Facebook was used to keep.
Ownership matters here. The app is run by BeReal SAS in Paris, but French mobile company Voodoo acquired it in June 2024 for around EUR 500 million, and it has since added advertising. So it is European, not independent and not ad-free, and it covers none of Groups, Events or Marketplace.
What BeReal does better than Facebook
- Chronological friends-only posts, with no algorithm choosing what you see
- No filters, no likes and no public follower counts
- Posts expire after a day, so there is no permanent profile to be mined later
- A French company under the GDPR rather than a US parent
- Reacting with a selfie RealMoji replaces the like button
Where BeReal is a step down from Facebook
- Funded by advertising since the Voodoo acquisition in 2024
- Not a photo archive, so it replaces none of Facebook's albums
- No Groups, Events, Marketplace or messaging beyond reactions
- Centralised, with no federation or self-hosting
Standout against Facebook. It is the only entry here that makes you post before you can look, which ends passive scrolling.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Source code. Closed source, as Facebook is.
- Independently checked. GDPR (with Standard Contractual Clauses for transfers outside the EU/UK).
Best for: Younger users who used Facebook to meet people and now prefer live video rooms to a feed.
Yubo is built for meeting people you do not already know, which is almost the reverse of what most adults use Facebook for. A swipe feed surfaces users who share your interests and are online, and conversation moves into live video, one-to-one or in group rooms, instead of staying in a photo timeline.
The Facebook comparison is about audience and age. Facebook assumes an adult friend graph; Yubo skews young by design and asks for a date of birth at signup, applying facial age-estimation and requiring parental permission in some jurisdictions. Those checks are the company's own answer to the risk of live video with strangers, and they are worth reading about before anyone under age uses it.
Twelve-App SAS in Paris operates it under French law and the GDPR, with standard contractual clauses for transfers outside the EU and UK, including to the United States. The core app is free, while Power Pack and Elite Pack subscriptions are priced per country inside the app. It does not federate and cannot be self-hosted.
What Yubo does better than Facebook
- A French company under the GDPR, where Facebook is run from the United States
- Interest-based discovery instead of a feed ranked for advertisers
- Live video rooms that Facebook's timeline does not centre on
- Age estimation and parental-permission checks built into signup
- Free to use, with no mandatory subscription
Where Yubo is a step down from Facebook
- Live video with strangers carries real safety trade-offs
- Power Pack and Elite Pack prices are shown only in the app
- Skews young, so it will not hold a family or school-parent circle
- No Groups, Events, Marketplace or photo albums
Standout against Facebook. It is the only entry here built around live video with strangers rather than posts to people you already know.
- Which law reaches it. EU (Germany). Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Managed hosting in German and EU data centres under ISO 27001; data stored in Germany per the terms.
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
- Independently checked. Hosting provider ISO 27001.
Best for: Organisations that want their own members-only network with spaces, a feed and events.
HumHub is the one entry here that rebuilds the part of Facebook people say they cannot replace: a closed group with a feed, files and events. It gives you profiles, spaces, a feed and more than 80 modules, but you run it for your own organisation. It does not give you the public audience of Facebook.
That answers the argument that a group only works if everyone is already inside. If a club, company or school brings its own members, the network exists on day one. HumHub is aimed at companies, institutions, nonprofits, associations and universities, so it suits a defined membership, not people trying to reach old friends.
The Community Edition is free under AGPLv3 and self-hosted. The Professional Edition starts at an indicative €144 a month for up to 100 users, with managed hosting in German and EU data centres at €36 a month on top. Someone has to administer it, and it has no native branded app or dues handling.
What HumHub does better than Facebook
- Open source under AGPLv3, so the code behind your group can be inspected
- Self-hostable, so the member list and archive stay on a server you choose
- Spaces and events give a group the structure of Facebook Groups without an ad business
- Managed hosting in EU data centres with data stored in Germany per the terms
- Prices published in euros, with a free Community Edition
Where HumHub is a step down from Facebook
- Someone must run or pay for it, from €144 a month for the Professional Edition
- Not built for public, search-indexed discussion or reaching strangers
- No Marketplace, and no existing user base to bring along
- No native branded mobile app
Standout against Facebook. It is the only entry here that lets a group own the network it lives in, running on software it can host itself.
- Which law reaches it. EU (France). Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the instance. Kaihuri's project site is hosted by Framasoft at Hetzner in Germany; framasoft.org is also hosted at Hetzner Online GmbH (Germany). Self-hosted instances sit wherever the operator chooses..
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Clubs, associations and local communities who mostly use Facebook for events and groups
Facebook bundles a timeline, photos, Groups, Events and Marketplace behind one login. Mobilizon targets two of those: Events and Groups. It is a French, non-profit-maintained, AGPL platform where each instance is independent and federated, so there is no advertising and no engagement algorithm.
For an association, club or neighbourhood initiative this covers a lot: publish an event, let people register, export to a calendar and run a group with public and private content. Events can still be shared on social media or by email, which helps with the reach problem.
What it does not replace is the rest of Facebook: no friends timeline, photo albums, Marketplace or login for other services. Discovery depends on the instance you use, and the audience is far smaller than Facebook's, so many communities will run it alongside Facebook at first.
What Mobilizon does better than Facebook
- No advertising or engagement algorithm
- Open source (AGPL) and publicly auditable
- Federated, no single owner
- Self-hostable by an association or municipality
- ICS and RSS export of events
Where Mobilizon is a step down from Facebook
- Far smaller audience and reach
- No timeline, photos or Marketplace
- Instance quality and moderation vary
- No single support contact or SLA
Standout against Facebook. It is the credible European answer to Facebook Events and Groups specifically, not to Facebook as a whole.
- Which law reaches it. Switzerland (adequacy decision, outside the EEA). Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
- Where the data sits. Depends on the hub you use; self-hosting keeps data on your own server.
- Source code. Open source, where Facebook is not: you can read what it does rather than take the description on trust.
Best for: Technical users and organisations wanting a self-hosted, permission-based community space
Facebook bundles a timeline, photos, Groups and Events behind one login. Hubzilla is one of the few open alternatives that covers a similar breadth: channels with posts, private groups, file storage, events, wikis and pages, with permissions set per item. It is MIT-licensed and supported by the Hubzilla Association in Basel, Switzerland.
It also addresses lock-in directly. With nomadic identity you can clone your channel to another hub, and with ActivityPub and Diaspora support you can interact with people on other fediverse networks. That removes advertising and engagement algorithms, but also the audience.
The weakness is reach and usability. Almost nobody's school parents, neighbours or old colleagues are on Hubzilla, and its interface is closer to an administrator's tool than to Facebook. Choose it for a defined community that is willing to learn it.
What Hubzilla does better than Facebook
- No advertising or engagement algorithm
- You can self-host and own your data
- Channel can be cloned or moved between hubs
- Per-item permission control for posts and files
- Open source code (MIT) under a Swiss non-profit association
Where Hubzilla is a step down from Facebook
- Far smaller audience, so contacts are hard to find
- Steeper learning curve and denser interface
- No Marketplace or mainstream Events adoption
- Quality and uptime depend on the hub operator
Standout against Facebook. A self-hostable community platform where identity, groups and files move with you instead of staying locked to one company.
- Which law reaches it. eu-eea. Facebook is run from the United States, so the CLOUD Act obliges the provider to hand over data on a valid order regardless of which country the servers are in.
Best for: Dutch-speaking users who want Facebook-style groups, blogs and business pages from one local operator
JustBSocial is the closest in shape to Facebook on this page: one account with a timeline, groups, blogs, videos, files and business pages, rather than a fediverse client or a photo app. The timeline is chronological, the site says it has no algorithm, and the privacy statement says only functional cookies are used. It is an installation of the open-source OSSN software with custom components added.
It is run by Eric Redegeld of Redegeld ICT in the Netherlands, continuing nlsociaal.nl, which he started in 2018 and relaunched under this name in August 2025. The privacy statement names a Dutch data centre and says all processing stays within the EU. Personal accounts are free forever according to its Pricing & Management page, companies contact the administrator, and a Costs & funding page publishes income and costs for 2026, with sponsors for businesses.
The cost of that simplicity is scale and continuity. No member count is published yet (the operator says a public count is planned), so the audience is unknown, and the service is run by its founder with a named backup administrator.
Fediverse support exists but is opt-in per user (each member activates it once in their own profile, the operator says), accounts are for people aged 18 and over, and accounts inactive for 12 months are deleted. Few of your friends will already be there, which matters more than any feature.
What JustBSocial does better than Facebook
- Groups, blogs, videos and business pages in one account, unlike Mastodon or Pixelfed
- Chronological timeline with no recommendation algorithm
- Only functional cookies, no tracking, per the privacy statement
- Dutch operator and Dutch data centre, with EU-only processing
- Account deletion removes the data within 30 days
Where JustBSocial is a step down from Facebook
- Tiny and unknown audience, so your contacts are unlikely to be there
- Founder-run with one named backup administrator, so continuity rests on very few people
- Fediverse posting is opt-in per member (activated once in the profile), so it is not on by default
- No Marketplace, Events or Messenger equivalent at Facebook's reach
Standout against Facebook. A one-person Dutch network that gives you Facebook's groups and pages with a chronological timeline and no tracking.
What actually breaks when you switch
Export first, and check the export before anything else happens. Facebook's download includes posts, photographs, messages and the list of things you have joined, and it takes time to prepare. Deleting the account removes the only copy of a great deal that you never saved anywhere, and there is no way back after the grace period ends.
Then deal with the login button. Facebook is the sign-in for a long list of other services people set up years ago and forgot, and closing the account can lock you out of them permanently. Go through the apps-and-websites list, set a real password on anything that matters, and confirm you can sign in without Facebook before you go.
Finally, be honest about the groups. Most people who come back come back for one group, one recurring event and one thing they wanted to sell. Move the group you actually need to a mailing list or a forum while you are still an administrator and can export the members, and accept that the rest of it stays behind.
What actually happens when you deactivate a Facebook account?
Less than people expect, and more slowly. The profile stops being visible, the timeline disappears from other people's feeds, and Messenger can be kept running separately if you want it. Deactivation is reversible; deletion has a grace period and then is not.
What does not happen is any change to what already exists elsewhere. Photographs other people uploaded of you stay up. Comments you left on public pages stay up under your name. Messages you sent remain in the other person's inbox, because they are that person's copy.
So deactivating is a good way to test the withdrawal, which is mostly social. Give it six weeks and see what you actually miss. For most people the answer is one group and one recurring event, which is useful information before deleting anything.
Can I move a Facebook Group somewhere European?
You can move the software and you cannot move the people, and the second one decides the outcome. A group of eighty where everyone knows each other offline can be told to join something else, and about half will. A group of four thousand strangers coordinating around a subject cannot be moved at all; it dissolves and a smaller version reforms somewhere.
If the group is genuinely important — a residents' association, a professional body, a club with subscriptions — the right answer is usually not another social network. It is a mailing list or a forum you run, because those are built for membership rather than for discovery, and membership is what you are trying to keep.
Whatever you choose, export the member list while you are still an administrator. Facebook does not hand it over afterwards, and most failed group migrations failed at exactly that step.
Is diaspora* still a going concern?
It is maintained, and it is very small, and both halves of that need saying. Development continues, slowly: version 0.9.1.0 shipped on 7 April 2026 with security and bug fixes, almost two years after 0.9.0.0 of June 2024 — the release that moved pods from unicorn to puma and cut their memory use. That is the work of a project that is alive, if unhurried.
The size is the problem. Counts in late 2025 put the network at somewhere between 29 and 66 active pods and between 274,000 and 325,000 registered accounts, of which roughly 21,000 were actually active in a given month. For comparison, that is smaller than a single mid-sized Facebook group.
What it is good for is a known circle: a family, an extended group of friends, a political or activist network that wants its own pod. What it is not is a place where you will run into people you lost touch with, which is most of what Facebook is for.
Which European tool replaces Facebook photo albums?
Pixelfed covers the published half — the photographs you want people to see, organised into collections, with comments underneath. It does that well and it federates, so anyone on Mastodon can follow the account without a second login.
It does not cover the private family half, and this is where most Facebook photo use actually sits: albums shared with twenty relatives, people tagged in them, memories resurfacing on anniversaries. That is closer to shared cloud storage than to a social network, and the right European answer to it is a Nextcloud album or an encrypted drive rather than anything on this page.
Be clear about which you have before choosing. If your Facebook photographs are mostly of children and grandparents, you want file storage with sharing. If they are mostly things you made and wanted seen, you want Pixelfed.
Which one to pick
If your Facebook was writing and arguing in public, Mastodon replaces it cleanly and the move to non-profit ownership means the thing you switch to is not going to be sold out from under you.
If you are moving a defined circle — a family, a club, a campaign — Diaspora is designed for exactly that and its per-audience posting is genuinely better than the equivalent you never used on Facebook. Just go in knowing that roughly 21,000 people are active in the whole network.
If it is the photographs, Pixelfed takes the published ones and European cloud storage takes the family ones, and trying to make one tool do both is where these migrations go wrong.
And if your account is really Groups, Events and Marketplace, nothing here replaces it. The realistic move is a hollow account you never post to, with the public part of your life somewhere you would rather it lived.
Frequently Asked Questions
Mastodon if what you want back is posting and reading, and it is the one with real momentum behind it. Diaspora if you are moving a defined circle of people who will follow you, and you want per-audience controls built into the design. Pixelfed if the part of Facebook you use is the photographs. For Groups, Events and Marketplace there is no answer on this page, and you should be suspicious of any page that offers one.
Yes. Messenger can continue after the profile is deactivated, which is the compromise a lot of people end up making because it is where family conversations live. Bear in mind that it keeps the account relationship intact, so this is a change in what you publish rather than a departure. If the messaging itself is the concern, that is a different question and belongs with encrypted messengers rather than with social networks.
Not a like-for-like one. Marketplace works because buyers are nearby and already signed in, and that combination is what displaced the classifieds sites across much of Europe. The practical substitutes are national: Marktplaats, Leboncoin, Kleinanzeigen, Blocket, Wallapop and their equivalents, which are real businesses with real audiences but require the buyer to have an account somewhere new. None of them is in this directory because they are marketplaces rather than social networks.
It removes your copy. Deletion has a grace period, after which the profile, posts and photographs you uploaded are removed from the service. What survives is anything that is now someone else's: messages in other people's inboxes, photographs other people uploaded of you, comments quoted in screenshots. Download your information before you start, because the archive is not retrievable once the account is gone.
Meta operates data centres inside the EU, and personal data still moves to the United States, which is lawful under the adequacy decision the European Commission adopted on 10 July 2023. That decision is in force and is being challenged in the courts, which is the honest state of play. What none of it changes is that Meta Platforms, Inc. is a US company and the product decisions affecting your account are taken in California.
While you still have an account they read, and more than once. A pinned post, a few weeks of repeating it, and a direct message to the twenty people who matter is roughly what works. After deactivation you are invisible, and there is no forwarding address, no redirect and no way for someone searching for you to find the new profile. This is the single step people skip and then regret.
It was built for the second and it is used for the first by people who wanted the posting rather than the network. The difference matters: Facebook organises around people you know offline and mutual friendship, Mastodon organises around subjects and one-directional following. If your Facebook is family and school friends, Mastodon will feel wrong. If your Facebook was long posts about things you care about and the people who replied were mostly strangers, it will feel like an improvement.
A named group of contacts that you choose to share a post with, so different parts of your life see different things. Facebook has custom friend lists that do something comparable, and almost nobody uses them because they sit three menus deep and the default is everyone. In Diaspora the audience choice is part of the act of posting rather than an option you have to go looking for, which changes how often it gets used.
About six weeks for the habit and considerably longer for the coordination. The scrolling goes quickly; what lingers is discovering afterwards that a gathering was arranged, a neighbour was looking for help, or someone had bad news and you were not told because you were not in the group. That is the real adjustment, and the people who manage it are the ones who moved their important groups to a mailing list first.
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