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 or Switzerland, and processes customer data in Europe. 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. Paid placement can affect which tools appear here and the order they appear in. 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.
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 |
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.
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.
Who worked on this review
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