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Comments (357)

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  darthcloud
  As a Canadian, I’ve been thinking since last year about migrating to non-US services and applications.My main goal is simply to avoid giving money or data directly to US corporations. I have no illusions, these non-US services probably still benefit US companies in some ways.They’re rare, but I’ve consciously decided to stay away from some Canadian alternatives. The main customers of most Canadian tech companies are in the US, and I feel they would happily move there if needed.I started with this:Gmail / Drive → Proton Mail / DriveNameCheap / GoDaddy → InfomaniakGoogle Maps → TomTomGoogle Chrome → VivaldiGoogle Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)GitHub → Codeberg & Codefloe (for private)I do like Proton Mail. The main thing I hate is how often the app and web versions get out of sync for read and archive states.I’m really happy with Infomaniak, migrating all my domains was a breeze.Vivaldi is based on the Chrome codebase, but I really love all the extra customization options. It was a very easy switch.Startpage took me some time to get used to. It’s not as good as Google, but whatever.TomTom isn’t great, but it’s not like Maps has been great over the last few years either.Forgejo is much better than what GitHub has become.Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
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  dinowars
  > First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaroundI use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?
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  pschastain
  How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review? Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.Worth considering when hosting in the EU.
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  _pdp_
  Our company started migrating our tech stack from USA to EU. We are about 90% there with a few small dependencies that could be resolved but we have not yet tackled.
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  deaux
  https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.
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  NoSalt
  > "the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection"I have not done any research into this facet of EU laws, but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
• kuon
  For domains, spread them across multiple registrars.
• BrunoBernardino
  For search, I'd suggest Ecosia [1] or Qwant [2] if you don't mind ads, or Uruky [3] if you don't want them (full disclosure, I've created Uruky with my wife).[1]: https://ecosia.org[2]: https://qwant.com[3]: https://uruky.com
• awongh
  > The reasons for this are [...] improved data protection.Didn't the Snowden leaks just prove that the NSA is listening to most things anyway?I suppose this has more to do with the specific case of a lower-level agency being able to access your data, rather than it being actually secure?I get that people would be concerned about that scenario, but also it seems like a little bit of hair-splitting.
• Invictus0
  Foolish blunder
• axegon_
  I've migrated just about everything I was relying on a while back. Not only that but I've self-hosted just about everything, with the exception of my email and I've moved whatever I have public on github to codeberg. With the exception of github pages, though I plan on doing that too, when I find motivation to going through the tedious DNS management. I've been on and off on qwant and ecosia for search(lately ecosia has been stepping up their game it seems). But I am considering switching over to searxng, I just want to put it behind a squid proxy somewhere remote, away from my apartment.
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  vertnerd
  Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
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  dwedge
  > For various reasonsBecause it's trending. Likely the same reason they ended up outside the EU in the first place.I find this to be a non article. They moved from Google to Google and Apple, installed Graphene but installed the play store for a "significant number of apps", and didn't even consider self hosting email or git.I've probably seen a dozen of these articles now, not to mention posts on LinkedIn, and it's a shame that there is almost never any real substance to them because on the surface it's an interesting thought experiment
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  dragochat
  how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_? with email accounts as the roots of trust for many things, i'd really wanna know how can I get a trustworthy one not-attached to eithern an unstable system (US), or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...and ofc, non-CN too
• Aldipower
  For transactional email, Lettermint is a great email broadcaster from the Netherlands. Saying this as a German means they really must be good!
• canmi21
  Big companies never treat your data good. It's better to store it privately :(
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  I_am_tiberius
  Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.
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  appstorelottery
  I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.
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  pelzatessa
  > I’ve always been a happy Mullvad customer. For 5 euros a month, I pay a Swedish company that has proven it doesn’t log any dataHow did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?
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  tonydav
  For mail I've been using migadu.I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)
• bkolobara
  Shameless plug. We have been working on building a European GitHub alternative for private repos at https://lubeno.dev.
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  andix
  Is there a good tool to automatically (and continuously) mirror all GitHub repositories to another provider? Something with GH API integration that also catches newly created projects/repos?Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
• max_
  > The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protectionI don't understand why people keep saying this when Europe is more hostile towards privacy.The constantly insist on schemes like chat control, and GrapheneOS users are often confronted by legal authorities.They may have "the laws", but its way less trust worthy.
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  hbbio
  Still not accepting Codeberg moral stance.Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).
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  mads_quist
  If you need an on-call / incident management platform like PagerDuty or incident.io All Quiet offers EU based Hosting and is operated from Germany:→ https://allquiet.app
• Raed667
  > set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wantedI have been frustrated with ProtonMail for this exact reason, i have a catch all but responding is a hassle where i have to manually create an address.I wish Proton would just allow me to respond to an email from the address it was addressed to
• achayala
  I did the same! The only problem with this is the uptime of codeberg.org, it sucks haha, but that is not a problem for me. I have not critical services there.
• s_dev
  https://european-alternatives.eu/I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.
• fmajid
  The EU is not a privacy and human rights panacea, as shown by the continuing efforts to impose Chat Control. Switzerland is no better.Then again one of my wife’s friends is high up in the Canadian policy establishment and some of her positions on surveillance and political control over social media were chilling, and I assume widespread among the Five Eyes. Certainly the UK and Australia have deeply authoritarian policies far beyond even Trump’s wildest dreams.Small countries like Iceland have enlightened policies but are vulnerable to coercion and in fact were militarily occupied during WW2.
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  jagermo
  Uberspace is solid and a lot of fun to try stuff out. For domains, i would also recommend inwx.com, they have been around for ages, good prices and no-fuzz admin stuff.
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  madflo
  I have been a customer of OVH’s new Zimbra Starter service. It works for my personal and professional needs, CalDAV and ActiveSync are active. I do not use the web interface so no feedback on this.
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  severino
  > First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaround, so the search continued.I had read about other problems about this mailbox.org service, but not this one. Anyone knows what's the catch when trying to send emails from your own domain?
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  brandrick
  Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.
• nopakos
  One concern is that if an EU company becomes very successful, it could easily be acquired by a large U.S. corporation.
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  twoquestions
  For the longest time it was an economic axiom that regulations drive off businesses, and here stronger laws are directly attracting business!
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  sobiolite
  I’m not with I could ever migrate away from Gmail, even if I wanted to. I have so many accounts and services linked to it.
• lvales
  This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.
• kouunji
  Honestly this is part of a macro trend of everyone outside the US scrambling to get off a US tech stack…these are going to be the longer term economic consequences for the country, as it is no longer seen as a safe option for any kind of data or service exposure.
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  atoav
  One tip in the EU is to consider just renting a Hetzner Storage Share. This is a 1TB (or more) Nextcloud that Hetzner manages for you for 5.11 Euros per month.A Nextcloud can give you many things at once, file syncing, file shares, contact syncing, calendar syncing, etc.I have been using this for years now after having hosted my own Nextcloud instance. The space and performance they give you for that price is unbeatable with nearly no downsides. The one downside is that you can't just ssh into the server, but you can even run occ managment commands via their web interface. It is an absolute no-brainer.
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  _joel
  You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.
• u8080
  Reminder: Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru) withour any legal basis and past prosecution: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
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  sph
  I'm also pretty much using 100% EU services except FastMail. Nothing against the Aussies, but I'd rather use something local, with servers within the EU.But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.
• silexia
  The EU has far worse freedom of speech laws than the US, most websites would be insane to migrate to the EU.
• dipshady
  hello
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  creantum
  Out of the pan into the fire
• piokoch
  I wonder what will happen when Jordan Bardella will be new France president and Alice Weidel will be German Chancellor. Where people are going to migrate to then...
• ankit7000
  "Running a €5 Hetzner VPS in Helsinki for 1+ year — CPX22 gives 3vCPU 4GB RAM. For most indie devs the EU infra is genuinely better value than US providers at the same price point."
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  sylware
  Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.
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  debugnik
  And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.
• pennaMan
  > the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protectionThis is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.
• BoredPositron
  Blast from the past... I really miss fluxbox but I also need Wayland because of different refresh rate monitors and the last time I checked waybox wasn't there yet.
• chairhairair
  "This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account."Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
• retinaros
  migrating to a re gion that votes laws to restrict freedom of speech, wants to remove anonymity from social network and can block your bank account for opinions that do not align with european stance on things like for instance mass migrations from third world countries. Yeah seems a smart move.
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• yurii_l
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• Unical-A
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• draw_down
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• drstewart
  Another daily thread on this topic. Interesting. What makes this one unique and not exactly like every other one?
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  lynx97
  I find it pretty ironical that people seem to want to move to Von der Leyens vision of the future. As a EU citizen, my trust in what recently has been going down is almost non-existant.
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  gradus_ad
  The EU is going to fail in the next decade or two. It is a financially and politically unsustainable patchwork that will rip apart in the great power conflict that is coming. The sick man of Europe is now Europe itself.
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  aborsy
  Some of these European countries such as France are quite authoritarian. They frequently pass (update: propose/push for) laws to ban VPN and even social media, request access to private messages, etc. It seems to me the situation is equally bad in EU.