Independence from USA
In my previous post I wrote in length about my feelings towards USA and concluded that I wanted to reduce my dependency on its tech products and services, which when I really zoomed out and looked at the things I use, turned out to be basically everything, which is really frightnening as a EU citizen in the current political climate.
Of course I won’t be able to move away from it entirely, and I think it’s also stupid to go that far in the name of ideology, but I’d be happy if I could move the majority of things, especially important things.
Passwords & secrets
Previously I’ve used a mix of Apple Keychain and Bitwarden for all my passwords / secrets, but both are U.S companies, and this type of data is definitely not something I want a country with no due process or privacy laws to have, especially one that has continuesly demonstrated its abuse of power towards civilians.
I’ve decided on moving exclusively to NordPass, which is developed by a Lithuanian company.
Social media
While I already wasn’t a big social media guy, I mainly made use of Reddit and Hacker News for my news and discussion needs. Both are run by U.S companies, and the pro-America propaganda is especially strong and nauseating on Hacker News, so it was honestly high-time to find something less entrenched in uncle sam’s patriotism.
I’ve settled on Mastodon. It’s decentralized, I can join a network run in EU, and I can follow hashtags to get news and discussions around topics I care about, all while I can also filter out noise I don’t care about.
Social media isn’t something I care enough about to self-host, so I’m just using the main mastodon.social instance. If it blows up one day, I’ll just sign up on a different instance and be fine. That said, it’s nice to know that if I wanted to self-host it, I could.
Music
The predatory behavior of Spotify and the U.S run alternatives to it all make me not want to pay any money to these types of services, at all. So instead of signing up for yet another music streaming service, I’ve instead resorted to purchasing the music I listen to directly from the artists themselves.
If they don’t sell their music on their website or on some other digital shop, like Bandcamp, then I’ll simply evaluate how much I care about it, and if I care about it a lot, I’ll just pirate it. Sorry, but not sorry. I’d be more than happy to pay, but I want ownership, not rental rights, and I’ve had plenty artists I like just vanish from streaming platforms, which is ridiculous.
Browser & Search engine
In a quest to get away from having all my browsing data mined for some AI training set or not being allowed to use a proper adblock extension, I really wanted to use LibreWolf. It’s a fork of Firefox with all its bullshit stripped out, but I’ve settled on Firefox itself because there’s no LibreWolf on the phone and I really need the two to sync well.
I’m very much looking forward to Ladybird, a truly from-scratch independent browser currently in development. I test drive it every week or so and it’s getting better every time, but as of now is still quite far from a daily driver material.
I’m also using Qwant as the default search engine, which I haven’t really formed much of an opionion on yet. It works for what I’ve needed it for, and it’s run by a EU company.
E-mail & Calendar
For quite a few months now I’ve been using Fastmail for both my e-mail and calendar needs. It’s run by an Australian company and it seems to focus on doing just a few things, but doing those few things very well, which is why I keep using it as opposed to something like Proton.
While of course I would prefer European, I’m fine if it’s from elsewhere as long as it’s not USA, and from the European I’ve tried (Tuta, Proton), I’ve liked Fastmail more.
Bonus points to Fastmail for allowing me to connect my work gmail and google calendar to it, so I can just use one web interface for everything.
Coding
I’ve never really pledged an allegiance to any one particular editor, so switching this around isn’t that big of a deal for me. That said, I’m doing my development work nowadays with a mix of OpenCode and Sublime Text.
OpenCode for agentic development, and Sublime Text for either reviewing the work I did in OpenCode, or when I need to get my hands dirty and really dig into a problem. Shout out to Tonsky for the Clojure Sublimed extension.
While OpenCode is run by a U.S company, it’s entirely open source and not run by big tech that’s doing its best to slopify its products and put people out of a job (cough Microsoft cough). That said, I’m still using U.S made AI models, and I’m not going to invest tens of thousands into my own AI hardware so it is what it is.
Sublime Text is another Australian creation, one which I’m a happy customer of, because just like Fastmail, they do few things, and do those few things very well.
Git & static site hosting
For half a decade now I’ve used GitHub for my open source projects and leveraged its built-in support for static sites to run this very blog as well.
Ever since Micro~soft~slop bought it, it’s been more and more entrenched in questionable use of AI, which is on-brand for Micro~soft~slop, and its been known to use your hard work to train its AI models, so that it could then charge you money to use its models, without giving anything back.
I’ve started hosting my own Forgejo instance at git.nmm.ee and have started the process of moving my open source work over to it. It’ll take a while before I get to all of it, but I’ve already set-up a CI/CD runner on it and this very blog of mine now gets built entirely on my own infrastructure.
I’ve also set-up another VPS that’s dedicated to just running static sites, which is where the outcome of the CI/CD build will be deployed to. That means I have 2 separate VPS’s running, one for Git & CI/CD, one for hosting static sites. Well 3, if you count Invobi as well, which runs on its own VPS.
I’m using UpCloud as my VPS provider, which is located in Finland and gives you many EU locations to choose from. I’ve been very happy with them thus far.
File storage
All my documents and media like images and videos that I’ve captured with my phone over the years are all on iCloud. While I’m generally a fan of Apple and I don’t have a reason to think that Apple would be selling out my data or using it for training any AI, I’d still like to have full ownership of my files, and not pay a subscription in perpetuity to have my files just exist.
For now I’m moving all of the data to my Framework laptop which has plenty storage (3.5TB) with backups going periodically to a separate SSD from the main one, which should suffice for a while, but long-term I’d probably like to set-up a NAS of some kind.
Hardware
I daily drive a MacBook and Framework computer, both American companies. I prefer Framework for not being big tech and giving me full ownership of every aspect of the device, but I love my MacBook for the performance and battery life it gives.
That said, I recently ordered the new Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 Mainboard for my Framework, so perhaps I’ll use Framework more and more with its performance improvements (and hopeful battery gains). I do prefer the Framework’s keyboard to the MacBooks, and I like knowing that I actually own every part of that machine, American or not.
There are some EU laptop makers as well, such as Tuxedo, but the repairability and upgradeability of Framework is just far too nice, and so for better or worse, my laptops will remain American for now.
I have been flirting with the idea of having the Fairphone be my next smartphone, which is sort of the Framework of phones with its full repairability, once my Pixel 9a gives up the good fight, but that will hopefully be a few years from now still.
Some things will have to remain American
Such as messaging apps like Messenger or WhatsApp, or sites like YouTube. There are many things where the network effects are just too strong or there isn’t a viable alternative, and that’s fine for me, now that most of the crucial things for me are no longer American, and no longer in one basket either.