My journey towards European sovereignty (and better privacy along the way)
Over the past few years it has become more and more obvious that the US tech industry has taken a very bad turn, promoting far right content and pushing people against each other (contributing at some point to a genocide) with their flawed algorithms, especially in the US. Unfortunately, we Europeans have been lazy for the past two decades, and we now rely way too too much on American tech products.
As a freelancer, I have worked on many projects since 2014, for French companies and others across the world, and almost every one of them consistently uses one of the US cloud providers champions (AWS, Google Cloud & Microsoft Azure). Hell, even my French private health insurance proudly hosts my data on AWS. This makes me angry. We should do better.
I think it's time we regain some sort of sovereignty and stop relying on a country that has no interest in protecting our data nor our democracies (the richest man on Earth, who made a nazi salute recently, has been pushing far right movements across Europe for months now). It's been ever clearer since the 2024 US elections where we saw all the big tech CEOs fully align with every bit of despicable politics of the 47th US president. We see you, you lame and pathetic little boys.
I'm just a fat little guy living in the countryside of France so I don't have the power to change the world for the better. What I can do, is try to do a small part and move away from US tech as much as possible. I've already started a while ago, and have only accelerated over the past few weeks.
My actions so far
Github
I created an account on Codeberg (A non-profit based in Germany) a few years ago, but never really made the move to it until December 2024 where I transferred all of my open source projects and became an active member to support the project financially.
Codeberg being dedicated to open source software, I also created a self-hosted Gitea instance to work on my private projects. I run my CI on my TrueNAS home lab where I installed a gitea runner. It's still a work in progress, but it's ok for now.
To avoid any data losses, I created a Rust tool called gitbackup that is automatically run every night thanks to a Scaleway Serverless Job: I created a small Docker container that builds gitbackup, then backs up the encrypted data with rsync to a Scaleway Container, which is fully S3 compatible.
Cloudflare
I was using Cloudflare to manage my DNS and host a few static websites (pure html, React & Vue). Since then, I moved to Bunny (a Slovenian company) for the DNS management, and my static websites are now hosted on Scaleway Containers.
I left this cesspool in 2022 for Mastodon but only deleted my account for good a few weeks ago. My main concern was name-squatting from some troll, but to be fair I don't give a shit anymore: if you see someone with my name saying racist shit, I can assure you it is not me.
I created my first Mastodon account in 2016 when it was released to the world, but was too stupid to understand that I shouldn't try to find the same people I was following on Twitter. Instead, I went back to Twitter (less and less, to be honest), then gave Mastodon a real chance in 2022. I now follow completely different people (half of them are probably writing Rust on NixOS right now) and that's ok! I moved from the main mastodon.social instance to Fosstodon and for now you can find me on Hachyderm.
The fediverse is beautiful and is the real decentralisation we all deserve (not that useless blockchain shit full of crypto bros and scammers).
I already deleted a first account in 2022 with all its data, but created a new one soon after just to follow people and artists I like. I exported my following list early in 2025 before deleting my account for good (I promise) and if I have some time (this is really very low priority here) I will hack together a scraper and make a RSS feed out of it (RSS is sexy and I will die on that hill).
Dropbox / iCloud
For as long as I can remember I have used Dropbox to synchronise a lot of my data. I may have used a bit of Google Drive back in the day, but it was really shitty. Dropbox sucks too, it went from a lean synchronisation app to a fully fledge useless behemoth. To avoid any indiscretions on my personal data, I quickly started to use Cryptomator to encrypt my most sensitive files and all of my business data.
I moved to Proton Drive at the end of 2024 and my Dropbox Family subscription lapses at the end of this month.
This one is pretty easy: I have been hosting my emails (personal and professional) away from Gmail for more than a decade now. I was using a French company called Gandi up until they were bought and went full straight shit. Then I moved to a small Swiss company called Migadu who has really smart pricing: you pay per resource, not per mailbox. I think this should be more generalised.
I could have stayed over there for a long time because I really like the product, but after I moved my data to Proton Drive, I have now access to all of the Proton ecosystem, Proton Mail included.
Domain names
Same thing as the emails: I've never really used any US company for my domain names and was a happy customer of Gandi for a decade. I have now most of my domains on BookMyName, a French company, and the rest at OVH (French) and Infomaniak (Swiss).
Youtube
I cleaned a lot of my subscriptions a while ago to reclaim some brain time and keep only high quality channels, mostly talking about engineering and science. I moved to Nebula a few years ago where I was able to find channels I was following on Youtube. I hope more will follow.
I have been trying Invidious as an alternative frontend to limit the tracking as much as possible. If it stays stable enough in the future it should allow me to delete my Google account altogether.
Google Chrome
As of today, there is no European browser available (early 2024 an initiative was launched but unfortunately failed to get enough funding to get a real impact) so Firefox is pretty much the only thing at hand (yes it’s still US based, but at least it respects your privacy).
It’s a no brainer: I have been a happy user of Firefox for a really long time. It may not be perfect, and Mozilla may have taken a few wrong turns recently, but I dont intend to use any Chromium based browser any time soon.
Feedly
This one is a bonus: I hadn't thought of leaving Feedly just yet but I got more and more bored of their constant push for IA bullshit so I recently moved to Inoreader which is based in Bulgaria. It's a welcomed change and I'm pretty happy with it.
My 2025 roadmap
I've already done a lot over the past few months, but everything is still a work in progress, so there's still much to do!
For now this is my biggest task for 2025: I'm a boomer and I have been on Facebook for most of my adult life. My family and friends are all here. A lot of them are on WhatsApp too (I already tried to move them to Signal but with no avail).
For the sake of simplicity, before leaving, I want to be able to follow some public pages through a RSS feed but of course Meta removed them a decade ago so I will need to work on something.
Google Maps
I still rely too much on Google Maps, almost two decades of bad habits die hard. I am currently forcing me to use alternatives like OsmAnd, Organic Maps and Magic Earth (for car navigation I am pleasantly surprised with the last one). I still need to export my hundreds of saved places on Google Maps and import them in a new app.
Google Translate
I’m trying to move to DeepL (a German company) but their pricing is a bit high for my use and sometimes the results are not great. I also really like the automatic translation from the camera or a picture that Google provides. I still need to do further research.
Google Search
I stopped using it years ago and have been trying various search engines since then. My current one is Startpage (a Dutch company) but unfortunately it retrieves its data from Google, whose results have been decreasing in quality for a while now.
I will continue to test new search engines and may give Kagi a try (yes I know it's based in the US too, but they seem to like privacy).
1password
I've been using 1password for more than a decade now, and I think it's time to move from yet another US company. The obvious contender here is Proton Pass, but it's still a pretty new app and lacks a few things that I need (more complex data, but most of all a SSH agent). In the meantime I may move to a mix of Proton Pass (as a past customer of SimpleLogin I am really looking forward to using fully integrated email aliases with a custom domain) and a self-hosted Bitwarden which conveniently offers an SSH agent.
My 1password subscription ends at the end of the year so it gives me plenty of time to make the transition. I'm taking this opportunity to make a big cleanup of all the accounts I haven't been using for a while: I have almost 600 entries on my various vaults...
Some closing words
Yes I'm switching to English on my blog now. Why? Because why not.
No I didn't use any LLM to write this rather long article. You probably already guessed it anyway thanks to my bad writing.
Yes, this blog post has been too long already. And it's pretty messy. I just dumped everything I had in my head in one go. Sorry.
No it's not easy to changes your habits, but I think it's worth it.
Peace <3