EU Sovereignty Score
Self-hosted / open sourceSocial MediaHeadquarters: DE

Friendica: sovereignty score and 8 European alternatives

Friendica is a decentralised social network that anyone can run on their own server. It offers posts, comments, photos, events and profiles, with access lists per item so that users decide who sees what. It federates with ActivityPub services such as Mastodon, with the diaspora* protocols and OStatus, and can bring in RSS and Atom feeds and email conversations. Written in PHP, it runs with MySQL, even on shared hosting; people either join a public server or install their own.

Friendica is free software under the AGPL-3.0 licence, developed in the open on GitHub by a community rather than a company, so no vendor sits between an organisation and its data. Each server is run independently, so data location and jurisdiction depend on who hosts it. An organisation can run its own server in an EU data centre, or choose a public server after checking its operator and country. Posts shared with other servers are copied there and fall under those operators' rules. Running a server means handling updates, moderation and backups.

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Sovereignty score
94 / 1000 = high exposure
100 = sovereign
  • Jurisdiction SOV-2100
    Headquartered in the EU: European law applies
  • Data residency SOV-3100
    EU-only hosting
  • Cryptographic key sovereignty SOV-390
    Self-hostable: encryption keys under your own control
  • Freedom from lock-in SOV-680
    Open source: low switching costs
  • Source & runtime sovereignty SOV-4 · SOV-6100
    Source code auditable, forkable and self-hostable

SOV codes: the matching objective in the European Commission's Cloud Sovereignty Framework. Official source

How the score is calculated

Facts and evidence

Last checked October 2, 2026
Headquarters
DE (EU)Verified by hand
Sovereignty model
Open-source, distributedVerified by hand
Data hosting
EUVerified by hand
Open-source
YesVerified by hand
GDPR-compliant
YesVendor-stated
Compliance documents
1 published, see belowVendor-stated
Hosting signal
IN-BERLIN-AS - Individual Network Berlin (_IN-Berlin_) e.V., DE (DE)Technically measured
Category
Social Media
Type
Product
Website
friendi.ca ↗

The hosting signal shows the network that serves the vendor's website, often a CDN, and not necessarily where the service or your data is hosted. How we verify · Something wrong? Suggest a correction

Top EU-based & GDPR-compliant alternatives to Friendica

The European alternatives to Friendica come from our knowledge base of over 6,800 vendors. We only list vendors headquartered in the EU or the EEA; fully European-owned vendors rank before vendors with a foreign owner. For each alternative you see the country, the open-source status and a short description.

Score per alternative: 0 = high exposure, 100 = sovereign

34 European Social Media vendors are in the catalogue. View the whole category · Submit an alternative · View category on the map

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Why digital sovereignty matters with Friendica

Friendica is headquartered in DE and therefore falls under European law: the GDPR, NIS2 and the Data Act. No foreign legislation can compel access to your data.

Data is hosted exclusively in the EU, so Friendica scores best on data residency.

Friendica is open source. You can audit the source code, self-host the software and keep the encryption keys under your own control. Switching is easier because data and software are not tied to a single party.

What this means for your organisation depends on your whole stack and context. The free assessment weighs Friendica together with your other vendors and gives a total score, a heatmap and the main risk drivers.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best European alternative to Friendica?

It depends on your use case. Strong EU alternatives to Friendica include Agorapulse, Akkoma and BeReal. On this page you can compare 8 EU alternatives by jurisdiction, data residency and open-source status.

Are there open-source alternatives to Friendica?

Yes. Open-source EU alternatives to Friendica include Akkoma and Diaspora. These keep your data fully under your own control and let you self-host if you want to.

Is Friendica GDPR-compliant and where is the data hosted?

Friendica is headquartered in DE (EU) and hosts data in EU. It is also open-source, so you can self-host it. That makes Friendica an EU-sovereign choice in its own right; the EU alternatives on this page are comparable European tools.

Details and sources

Verified by handHeadquarters, owner, hosting locations and licence have been checked by us against public sources. Free of charge and for every vendor, not a paid label. Nothing in this knowledge base is taken over automatically. Last checked on October 2, 2026.

Sources

Public sources used in the latest check of this record.

Compliance evidence

The links below point to the vendor's own public documents. We only record what we found: a missing link means "not found publicly", not "not compliant".

Security page / trust center
friendi.ca/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffriendi.ca%2Fsecurity-policy%2F

Provenance of the links above:Vendor-stated

Links checked on September 21, 2026.

Digital sovereignty in Social Media

Social Media: Social networks — posts, media, communities. In this category the choice of vendor determines who has legal access to your data, where that data lives and how easily you can switch later.

Also in this category

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8 European alternatives to Friendica — GDPR-compliant & EU-hosted · EU Sovereignty Score