* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
> 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
I 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?
I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.
I use mailbox for the past few years and I think it's the best option out there. But they have one major issue, which is that anyone can impersonate your domain:
Have been using mailbox.org with a custom domain (including catch-all wildcard) for the last 5 years or so, so it's definitely possible and as far I remember quite straightforward.
My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).
When you have a custom domain you can list @mydomain.com as sending domain allowing you every string before the at character. So that means you could use 50 different domains with infinite adresses on these domains.
The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.
...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)
Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access
The EU has about 450 million citizens, which of course limits my direct vote. Downside of a democracy (EU is a complicated democracy, but still) is that a majority probably has other priorities than me.
However there are many ways to impact policy makers. From individual contact to impact on the public debate. Even a small post here may lead to people considering their vote or contacting a local or EU parliamentarian, which in sum pushes the needle. In the end they are receptive, as they need the votes by the people.
It's long and tedious and not all things go anywhere, but then again: I am just one in 450 millionand for most of those priority is to have a Job which pays the rent and food and thus I have to break it down to be relevant for them.
The actual answer as to how much you influence policy is: none at all.
The European commission proposes laws. European commissioners are proposed through existing EU institutions. They are not voted in.
You vote for MEPs, who discuss laws, pass them, perhaps amending them. They do not propose them.
And by the way, this is not democracy, it is 'representative democracy' - you vote for one person to represent you and 100,000s of others for all the decisions an MEP makes over their 5 year term. They are not bound in any way to stick to their campaign promises.
Anyway, you might be happy or not about the laws these unelected bodies pass - I'm glad you seem happy about it. You might or might not see Europe as a triumph for its subjects. But there is no need to kid yourself or others that you have any impact over policy.
The European commission are appointed by the Council of the EU which is composed by elected individual member countries' heads of government. Commissioners also need to be individually approved by the European Parliament which is directly elected.
Representative democracy is democracy. Basically all nation level democratic governments are representative democracies.
EU has citizenship initiatives. Citizens can propose changes to the law and the parliament has to discuss it.
Stop Killing Games movement actually got a foothold.
EU as every healthy democracy has also non-elected experts (just like judiciary side) in its organs who can create law proposals. That's how we got USB-C and GDPR.
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.
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 / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google 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.
To you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work?
I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
When first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using
At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it
I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere
If you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain
This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.
I've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it.
One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there
pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
I've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/).
I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.
New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.
That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).
I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.
I've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do
- gdrive style storage
- dropbox style synced folders
- photo app/backups
- PC folder backups
with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux
TomTom isn't OSM, they just use OSM as one input among many into their mapping model. OSM has significant limitations as a standalone mapping model but many companies find it useful for augmenting more sophisticated mapping models.
Yeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges.
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming. Everything is done e2ee where possible. In case of mail, when the peer has no Proton, mail is indeed send plaintext.
Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought.
It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
You’re post is full of misconceptions and mistakes.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
> They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t
You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.
> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.
I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.
> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
They aren’t. They do have made their IT such that they can move very easily. If the Swiss government will pass worse privacy laws, Proton said they will move to Norway or Germany.
I'm using it Infomaniak, including their KDrive as a Dropbox replacement (with 2TB of data). I've even used their video conferencing app. No complaints so far. All seems to work just fine.
On the contrary, maps are (IMO) one domain where FOSS is genuinely better. OpenStreetMap data is far more detailed than any corporate map, and the available clients (Osmand in particular) are far more powerful.
You-know-who can only compete because of its (admittedly useful) data on businesses. And, alas, because of ignorance among normies, many of whom are still clueless that, for example, for hiking or outdoor wayfinding, there are much better alternatives available.
The maps can be considered metadata. The data is the points and tracks, which should be self-hostable. I have them synced locally (desktop-mobile). The setup was admittedly an absolute PITA involving shell scripting and Python.
Some anecdata I can offer: since last year I have used exclusively Osmand for navigating over 3000 km of cycle touring, on roads and paths of all types. The most common problem that arises is wrongly tagged surfaces (and occasionally access rights) for tracks and paths, i.e. for "roads" that do not even appear on the corporate maps. There is no comparison in terms of detail. Obviously this is less relevant for regular car drivers.
And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.
Organic Maps is great for offline. It even did better directions in Europe recently, because Google Maps does not have an "avoid unpaved roads" option.
Apple Maps does driving directions way better in general. It does foreign pronunciations better too IIRC. It's even not bad as a PWA on Android ( https://maps.apple.com ).
Google Maps loves to say take eg "exit Via Emilio Enrico" on some random roundabout in some random Italian town, seemingly with no idea that there are big signs to eg "VERONA". The street name is often totally useless.
I also find Google Maps does a great job at directing me into traffic. Like, not unexpected traffic at all.
Google Maps is great at giving you terrible recommendations because of the heavily, heavily filtered/gamed reviews however. Nothing more untrustworthy than a 4.7 star review on Google.
And of course there is also Mapy, HERE, TomTom etc...
I'm in the process of migrating to self-hosted immich and the experience is being great so far. If you have a beefy home lab it is incredibly fast and performant. One thing to mention is that you should have a good backup strategy not to risk losing your photo library
"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."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
Agreed, this is a VERY odd statement. There are a bunch of Canadian companies that have been here for a long time. I don't have the data but would DNS and hosting providers like EasyDNS and HostPappa really have primarily US customers?
Im sorry but saying you won't support your own people because you THINK they MIGHT move to the US is BS (I removed it originally because I toned down my knee jerk reaction but I defend it as you brought it up). I hope OP has enough emotional capability to handle some gentle feedback.
FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.
Because 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
/r/BuyFromEU is a continuous enumeration of individuals posting from what US services to EU services they moved. I agree that these posts get uninteresting once you have seen a few. I would be more interested in I have used European service X for 6 months, these are the up/downsides I found, since they actually help people picking alternatives.
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).
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.
>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?
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
His comment did not even mention the US. Only critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU. One of the issues with modern politics is everyone wants to deflect.
I need to host my emails somewhere. This means that you can't reject the EU in isolation, you have to compare it to the alternatives. And the most prevalent alternative is the US
Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about
Funny enough, they mention moving to ProtonMail which is at least based out of Switzerland. It makes this whole chain a bit funny, but I don't blame the commenter for not breaking down every service the OP talked about and the OP did shorthand it to "Migrating to the EU", so fair enough.
Didn't proton fold like a wet napkin when they were asked for information about their users? What I mean is: Switzerland as a whole is probably the wrong metric...
Switzerland - as well as EU based providers - have to comply with court orders. And the EU as well as Switzerland issue court orders upon request from friendly foreign states ("Rechtshilfeersuchen" in german) - such as the US.
Wasn't Proton launched as a "your data is encrypted at rest, we could never access it without your consent"? The implication being that even if they received said court orders, they didn't have anything to give. Am I misremembering that?
They encrypt your data insofar as your email, files, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't have information potentially useful to the authorities. See the recent headline where they revealed a user's payment information allowing them to be identified.
These are also political decisions and the EU is much more powerful politically than Switzerland so if your adversary is the US and they're willing to use lawfare or more than you should probably go with the EU and not Switzerland. Germany is considered one of the most robust legal systems for privacy.
Do you run your email server? I run two, have next to no problems (the key is in setting up DNS correctly, as I mentioned) and keep getting told this by people who have never tried.
I made sure to include the word correctly in the reply. Mox mailserver tells you exactly what to do. I think mailcow does as well. A lot of people don't do it and then tell others that selfhosting email with good deliverability is impossible. You set it up once and you're good to go
Yes but you may need the IPs to warm up and build some reputation, depending where you setup your server the IPs may be burned. Check logs and reputation with some of the postmaster tools the major providers offer and with the services that allow looking up an IP. senderscore used to be convenient to use now it displays a stupid contact form when you try to check an IP, there are others.
To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.
Yes they do. I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start, and configure DNS correctly, it's generally fine.
It's happening in the EU too, just not at such a fast pace than in other regions. And it's still far away from authoritarianism.
Currently it's just smaller pieces and no bigger agenda is visible (or even exiting). But there are constantly new regulations that would make an authoritarian coup (like currently in the US) easier.
> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order
The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.
Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.
It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:
1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.
2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.
3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals
There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.
The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.
Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.
Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.
See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.
I agree that presidential systems in particular are problematic, and the EU is lucky that Germany and France use parliamentary systems. But the nasty thing about populism is that it happens in waves and it does overtake parliaments. We need only look at what happened to the UK with Brexit for a recent example. It's not hard to imagine that a wave of far-right populism could one day overtake Germany, or send France's RN, Austria's FPO or Poland's PIS to a majority position.
We can cross our fingers and hope that nobody would work with them (I know that Germany's parties all have a pinky promise not to work with AfD), but it was only 10 years ago that everyone in the US was laughing at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and now here we are, much sobered. These things happen, and AfD, or RN, or whoever, could wreak havoc to the EU from within the EU if they took power and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs and more.
Most European countries have functioning legal and electoral systems, and more than two parties. On top of that, constitutional courts aren't political appointments.
So it would be incredibly hard for a political entity like AfD or RN to gain full and absolute power like the orange has achieved. Even in the worst cases, those parties usually only have ~30% popular support at most, which usually translates to at most ~30-40% of seats in parliament. Which means they cannot even get parliamentary majority, and probably can't get head of state either.
Americans just like to pretend things aren't that bad and they aren't the only ones falling into the abyss.
Could you explain to me (non-US and non-EU resident), how people in EU are okay with mandatory photo scanning on your devices(aka CSAM protection)?
Who does this weird proposals like Chat Control?
AFAIK, it is not "alt-right" parties - so it really does not clicking for me, why AfD and others constantly brought in during online privacy discussions?
I'm not pretending things aren't bad, I'm pointing out that things could be bad for you as well. America had functioning legal and electoral systems too, and we only need to look at Brexit for a shining example of how parliamentary systems can also fail to resist a populist wave. By refusing to acknowledge that, you look no wiser than the Americans who were laughing at the idea of a Donald Trump presidency just ten years ago.
Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.
The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.
> The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
I wish there was an easy way for me to bet against the imminent fall of the United States as predicted by so many internet commenters. I don’t like what the current administration is doing, either, but I would readily bet against all of these “the end is just around the corner” or “the empire is dying” takes in a heartbeat.
I didn't say the US is finished, I said it was finished as a liberal democracy.
It's already slid in to 'electoral democracy' instead of 'liberal democracy' the difference between the two is how 'rule of law' is prioritised and the balance between checks and balances between institutions is enforced.
Not quibbling but to be fair that report shows problems in Europe too, not the same speed of change, and its a different situation, but if you care about democracy its not great.
>The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states
But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.
What actually happened was that former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly stated on French TV in January 2025 that if the AfD won in Germany, elections there could also be annulled by the EU "as was done in Romania". That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen, he did not represent the EU in any capacity, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the EU pressured Romania. Of course, post-truth political movements run with a distorted version of this story to play the victim.
Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!
From e.g. Wikipedia:
>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
D'oh!
>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen
How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?
And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
Trends are various. You had Poland remove rightwing goverment 2 years ago (yes and elect righwing president few months ago). Romania electing a European centric president.
We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.
I'm not advertising the US here or trying to troll. I'm an European pointing out things about the European system that many here will not have thought about.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
I’m in the US and generally pretty level-headed. Nothing makes me become a red-blooded patriot nationalist temporarily faster than seeing Europeans completely ignore the similarities in our political ills.
It always boils down to, “but it’s the good kind of authoritarianism we have that preserves social order!!!” as if that has never failed to produce desired results. Thanks for being much more rational. We have a concerning political trend here in the US, it can’t be denied, but the EU is following in step.
Yeah, it's really bizarre how this has to be turned into a competition. We have stupid problems in the EU that don't exist in the US and vice-versa.
The way this particular part of our system works is downright horrifying, but it's exotic enough that very few people (even lawyers) will be familiar with it.
Sorry what? While there are right wing idiots in various governments in the EU, the Trump admin is on a completely different level. Also the bosses of big tech are clamouring over each other to s** him off.
I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.
Just saying, the vast majority of services people are moving from would be US based given it is where all of big tech comes from. So comparing it to the US is relevant?
If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
>If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
I'm not trying to say anything about anyone else besides the EU. Therefore I'm certainly not trying to compare EU to anyone else.
I am an European pointing out issues with the local system, issues that many commenters here clearly aren't aware of given how many replies seem to think that they'll be just fine as long as they don't host in Hungary.
What a disingenuous comparison. The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years. In contrast, the corresponding wiki article on the US ("Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States" [1]) estimates more than 900 deaths per year. Indeed, the number of slayings is so great that the article does not tabulate the sum in a single table (as the German article does) but instead links to separate wiki articles with tabulated results by month.
Over the last 100 years, almost certainly not. For the most recent decade? Yes, of course I would expect these statistics to be fairly accurate.
Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.
> Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry
The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.
And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?
> 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?
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)
Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.
Sure, those EIO will be held if Hungary starts applying EIO that it got (e.g. for former Ministry of Justice of Poland which awaits trail, he sits comfortably in Hungary).
Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.
I think you might be missing the ‘concerning’ part. Which specific cases are concerning? I don’t find it inherently concerning that people can’t escape justice by crossing the Hungarian border, Bonnie and Clyde style.
Too explicitly spell it out, op is saying here that if any one of the 27 countries in the EU decides you are breaking one of their laws, they can have 1 of the other 26 enforce an EIO.
EIOs are subject to a dual criminality requirement. So it’s not as if arbitrary Hungarian laws can be applied in France via EIOs. And of course, we all know this is not happening, which is why we get radio silence from the people who are ‘concerned’ about this whenever specifics are requested.
Annex D is a list of things that are crimes pretty much everywhere.
Not sure what to make of the claim that Hungary might theoretically be enforcing Hungarian law in France. It seems surprising that no-one has noticed any specific consequences of this that you can point to.
The EIO is mostly just a formalization and standardization of a bunch of ad-hoc processes that were already in place. Law enforcement agencies in different European countries do try to assist each other, on the whole.
What you're missing is the erosion of the ability of the executing states to say things like "hey this is sketchy, we think this crime might not have happened", "hey the police department in this particular city is notoriously untrustworthy", or "hey this prosecutor is widely known in the local press to be corrupt and owns a collection of ferraris".
Now foreign authorities are trusted by default and significant parts of their reasoning are not subject to review, that's bad.
Oh no, that's totally up to you. If you're happy with the courts in your country not being able to review the requests sent from Hungary, that's cool. Without transparent judicial review, how could we even know if the cases are concerning?
"Subject to review" means little more than "is the form filled correctly?", it certainly does not mean second-guessing by the courts in the executing state.
Like, yeah, your EIO will be rejected if you don't tick any of the crime-category boxes in the form.
You can look at past ECHR decisions for countless cases of abuse by various national governments.
You can look at the history of EAW related litigation also, it'll probably prove most informative. Executing states used to constantly deny requests due to judicial review, rules were clarified to remove the possibility of judicial review by executing states.
> 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?
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?
You are technically correct but seem to be applying common law standards to civil law countries.
Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.
This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.
They don't, they don't even apply to EU citizens keeping their (our, in fact) data on our (EU's servers) if what we're doing happens to cross some interests of the US Government. I mean, there are some legal "protections" in place for that, but notice the quotes. Thinking otherwise is delusional, but, hey, people should be allowed to enjoy the liberty of their slightly larger iron bird-cage.
The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.
You linked to a site about press freedom, which is a subset of free speech and not generally what Americans are talking about when they talk about freedom of speech.
"Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.
Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?
It's worth reading the specific actions they cite that lower the US's ranking. They include the closure of Voice of America, a government-run propaganda outlet for foreign audiences (and I do think that closure is bad! just not relevant at all to free speech); mergers of several big media conglomerates; not to mention, bafflingly, restrictions on journalism by the Iranian government in Iran, which somehow counts against the US.
None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.
Boiling down the different approaches to freedom of speech to "The baseline level is higher/lower", has always been a pretty simplistic (and if you would actually delve into the topic a little, flat out wrong) view .
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.
And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.
> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.
Oh please. There's free speech without a free press (US ranks 57/190, behind Sierra Leone) people are just amplifying the same BS they heard from some ignorant influencer. I would argue even your idea of "active enforced blasphemy laws" shows that. That's worse than useless, that is detrimental to a society (case in point, the current president and his whole cabinet).
> We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws
In a very narrow interpretation, yes. Everyone with a modicum of common sense would realise that countries with laws on the books against offending religions / inciting hatred against them are still more free than a country where the fucking Bible is cited in court rulings and political speeches, and where there are active laws prohibiting non-religious people from holding office.
One is for keeping the peace, the other is actively meddling religion and politics.
> baseline level of freedom of speech
Being unable to spout Nazi ideology is technically a restriction on freedom of speech, yes. But again, anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a bit of historical understanding) would understand this to be a good thing.
The far right is ascendant in Europe; obviously restrictions on speech haven't prevented that. I am Jewish, I have a strong dislike of Nazis, and yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society. Criminalizing speech doesn't stop people from holding abhorrent beliefs.
It's fine if you think the American approach to free speech is bad - you don't have to live here - but please justify that rather than just name-calling.
> yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society
How did that end last time? We know where it ends, we know there's nothing redeeming. Nobody needs Nazis, there is nothing to be gained by engaging with them or giving them a platform.
That they did not apply. They let a guy who tried to overthrow the government free to run for election again. This kind of thing should never be allowed. Someone who physically demonstrates they have no business in a democratic society doesn't belong in it.
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation. Is that a big victory for the rule of law? I think not, the national governments should not be knowingly violating the ECHR in the first place.
It took Ireland years from an ECHR ruling to rule buggery was not unlawful, and Ireland was given a special exemption to the EUs abortion laws which remained in place for 26 years.
I interpret ECHR as what it is: not a regulatory body by any stretch of the imagination. It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so. You seem to be interpreting it as some sort of an equivalent to the US supreme court, which it is not.
But now we're straying even further from my original argument which boils down to "laws mean something" into arguing the intricacies of how laws are supposed to be changed. I'm not interested in having that discussion, as it has nothing to do with my original claim.
The only thing ECHR cares about is one piece of "legislation", which is not a law, but a declaration (Declaration of Human Rights), so that you have some sort of internationally recognised body to go to whenever you feel that your local judicial system has done you injustice. That is all it does. That is all it is meant to do. That is the sole reason of its existence. It is not a legislative body at all.
> ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
It can't. You're either making things up or severely misunderstanding the court. It can say "this law doesn't align with the Declaration" and that's it. The law still exists. ECHR relies on signatories being willing to make the necessary changes themselves. Some are and get right on it, some aren't. The election law in my country has lost 5 cases in the ECHR and not a single one of the verdicts are fixed as of now, the oldest of which dates back to 2009. This is horrible, I want to see them fixed, but ECHR can't force us to fix it and we as in the country face 0 consequences for not addressing any of them (as of yet).
There is a separate court called European Court of Justice which is the equivalent of the US supreme court and is tasked with interpreting EU-wide laws and making sure national laws are aligned as much as possible. That is a legislative body with an enforcement mechanism. ECHR is not, you don't know what you're talking about.
The EU governance system is vastly different than the US, and not nearly as fragile. Even if AfD gets sway in one country, it doesn't mean that suddenly they can do anything they want like you saw in the last US election.
My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
> My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
We've already seen with Brexit that 100% control is not needed in a parliamentary system to destroy a country's livelihood. But my point was that AfD doesn't need something like "presidential control" of the EU, it would just need to start working with other far-right parties in the EU such as Hungary and France's RN to sow chaos from within. Is that very far-fetched? You can't tell me that most of Europe doesn't hold its collective breath at every French election, crossing their fingers that Le Pen's party doesn't win this go around.
AfD is a far right populist party in the EU's biggest economic powerhouse country, whose explicit goals are to leave the EU (they probably can't due to the German constitution), exit the eurozone, withdraw from the Paris climate deal, leave NATO, and cozy up with Russia.
It's not hard to imagine what kind of damage they could do to the EU if they took power in Germany and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs, etc.
> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.
> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.
> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.
Without disagreeing at all, can you think of a major jurisdiction that's better? US I basically assume everything is searchable without a warrant, if not leaked on a ex-DOGE intern USB stick.
Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.
I'd say don't let perfect be the enemy of good/better. Moving from US to EU is a move for the better. But EU isn't perfect, and there might be even better options available, but unless you have them, I'd recommend starting with the move to EU.
Do you seriously think that US requires warrants from US judges to spy on non-citizens abroad? That is 100% false. There is zero protection from the US govt for non-citizens living abroad.
As long as you stay away from questionable behaviour, there is very little chance to encounter the police in the EU or having problems with your privacy. USA is different in that regard. Your existence can be a problem. Or monetary interests will risk your privacy to whoever wants to make money with you.
EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?
EU is not a single uniform blob. There are neighbourhoods where you have to worry about being shot, and there are neighbourhoods where people leave their keys inside their cars.
Obviously, but we are talking about online-activity here, not randomly walking the streets. The normal sketchy cop on the streets will not be accessing your mailbox just because they don't like your skin. Attending certain events would trigger this more likely, but then you should also know how to protect yourself in those cases.
How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
It’s why I don’t trust anyone. Sure, EU has better policies and regulations than the wild west (US/Canada), but they still can and will do monkey business when needed, and they are more twisted about it than the US. The best strategy is to host your own and encrypt all, if it’s too much effort for some services try to use one from a country that has no interest in you (outside the west for example).
This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.
>What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
Yes. The more worrying situation is that Hungary can just decide that their police officers can self-issue search warrants, and then send those around the EU in the form of EIOs.
> Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.
Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.
> you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
>it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
> village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
> far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
> Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever
I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
>If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
Just like the random mugger on the streets of Paris is a far bigger threat to my life and limb than the US with their drones.
You're talking from an ideological perspective, I'm looking at this from a rather more practical angle. It's very possible that your line of thinking leads to a better outcome than mine, or perhaps it doesn't.
>I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
Maybe the motivation is more to stop giving American big tech MAGA fascists money rather than any kind of gain in privacy/security against state level law enforcement.
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.
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.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
Lot of discussion about different privacy laws across jurisdictions, and while I understand a lot of users have different approaches to privacy and opinions on political matters, realistically if your threat model is the NSA or some other three-letter agency:
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
If your threat model is the NSA, moving to non-US providers actually lowers the barrier as they no longer have to deal with the US constitution and US citizen data. If your threat model is law enforcement (or border/customs, et al), moving to EU really doesn't cause much in the way of speed bumps.
In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.
Yeah, sure, but this idea that the government is the threat you're defending against is very American. I'm not saying I trust my government with a lot of my personal data, but they're not the most important threat I'm defending against when I look after my privacy online.
Totally get what you're saying, and improving personal security can also be fun as a mental exercise. It's just there's a lot comments in this thread (hundreds) about how you can migrate EU to escape USG surveillance, which is just not realistic.
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...
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
Runbox are a good option - company and servers in Norway: https://runbox.com/
Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.
Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
Can recommend Runbox for a lot of reasons, but one gotcha that bothered me in day-to-day use was that emails are delayed by a minimum of 30 seconds, with no real upper bound, just a probability curve with, say, the 90th percentile around 5 minutes. On rare occasions, that means OTPs or login links valid for 5 minutes have expired when you get them. Yes I talked to support, yes they cared, yes they subsequently ghosted me when delivering the requested headers of emails delayed for more than 5 minutes which they considered a normal delay "because email wasn't supposed to be real-time" (be that as it may, that doesn't take away the problem that you sit there 30 seconds... 60 seconds... 90 seconds, wondering if you should go do something else while you wait for the confirmation link and get back to your current task later)
Seriously though, nothing but recommended in every other regard. Alias management, anonymous domains you can use, configuring the sender in Thunderbird no problem, everything else was great. My colleagues didn't seem to mind this delay so much as me so it's something to be aware of but might work fine for you
I agree, as a happy Runbox customer of several years. But probably the parent post meant non-EEA too, as Norway is effectively subject to any and all EU regulations.
And that's pretty much the thread. You're either subject to a large power's jurisdiction or subject to a jurisdiction whose sovereignty is at the pleasure of large powers... Pick a threat model, plan appropriately, and keep things in perspective.
> how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_?
Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.
> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?
...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)
If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at rest
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
lol, you want trustworthy stability without “too many” regulations. Good luck with that.
I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.
One of the other comments mentions https://codefloe.com. I haven't tested and haven't yet checked their background, but they seem to allow private repositories.
I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.
You are just a glitch in their system. They won't check the content of private repos, and they probably also do not check if there is free software hosted at the same account, so you might have found the hole in their good will.
But their limit seems around 100 MB storage-usage, so I guess it's within their abilities to tolerate some glitches.
Ah ok, well, save for some drafts I wouldn't mind opening the repo which is just a Hugo system intended for a public website anyway. But good to know. Perhaps I will self-host that forgejo instance then :)
Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.
Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
I think GDPR is a good example of why it doesn't really work in practice.
I think the fines and enforcement have been a generally good balance to the status quo in the USA.
But- in practice, is your data materially used differently than in the USA?
The problem is that no one is abandoning facebook, instagram or youtube and that data is being used in the exact same way as it is in the USA- to sell you things and track you across the web. Technically there are more barriers to getting and using that data, but I would argue that it's not a blocker, just an inconvenience to those using that data- it just makes the targeting etc. 10% less accurate. The whole system still runs the exact same way.
And, to make it look like it seem like it works now everyone has to deal with these dumb popups that don't mean anything.
If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
I have like 20-ish[0] people using my Migadu account and I've only hit the hard limit once, and it was because one of them was trying to do a mailing list....
Once I got them on a better path, I haven't had any issues. I don't remember what plan exactly, but I've been a customer for a long time, since they were founded pretty much.
0: I host a non-profit and we use my migadu account, since they are broke and I'm too lazy to count the actual number.
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
The gift card is a scratch off and has a number that is used to fund your Mullvad balance. So Amazon doesn't know which instance of the gift card you ordered, meaning there's no link to your specific Mullvad account payment.
The authorities might know you ordered a gift card, but not which Mullvad account you funded it with.
Shameless plug: if you think about switching from Google Analytics/Hotjar, check out my project[0] (built in EU, started in Romania, now working on it remotely in Netherlands).
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
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.
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).
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software…
This is already a crazy take on its own, why would a fork have to describe their relation to the parent project front and center? Both the Readme and the comparison page link to the origin blog post [1] that describes the lineage clearly.
But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?
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.
> set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted
I 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
Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
With google, the problem is that their "AI" can randomly ban you though. And the only recourse is making it to the top of HN. If that even works any more.
Honestly, the instability of the political environment in US feels so extreme, that it seems like something could bite you that you didn't even see coming.
Just on the Gmail front: maybe Trump decides to trade embargo you country and pressures Google to cut off email access. Maybe he decides Google needs to be broken up and sold for parts, and Gmail's data goes to Truth Social. Maybe he thinks illegal immigrants or "radical left wing lunatics" shouldn't have access to American email providers and gets Google to start suspending accounts based on a some criteria. Maybe some of this seems far fetched, but we are talking about a president who threatened to to go to war with one of America's closest allies.
The non-American west's exposure to the instability is too high, and already affecting people. Switching software providers where possible is something that can be done quickly, and relatively easily by individuals in the short term.
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
i thought the same but ive actually moved twice now. first to protonmail whenever that came out, then again a few years ago to posteo. it actually didnt feel like that much work in the end. i set up forwarding and switched over a few accounts every week. i still kept my gmail account around for years just in case but there will be a point where you just know you have all the important things switched over
Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app.
My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.
thunderbird (formerly k9 mail) is a decent enough android app, but im not very picky when it comes to email either so keep that in mind. ive been using it with posteo for about 2 years now
Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.
I did it with tons of accounts and services linked. It's not anywhere as daunting as you'd think (and I thought). Although it seems you don't want to move away from it so I'm not sure what point your comment serves to make.
I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
For a European alternative to Google Docs / Notion, we made https://kraa.io/about that might work for you if all you need is a simple editor with collab features.
Migrating away from US services altogether is an admirable goal. In cases where that's not possible, it's still worth moving off the services and platforms offered by large tech companies.
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.
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.
The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.
I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.
> "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?
> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
It's a case of "better is not perfect".
Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.
What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.
For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.
There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)
Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.
The stated reason in the article seems like Switzerland should be as good as EU, if not better.
> I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection.
"or switch to European service providers". EU or not, CH is still in Europe, so would qualify?
> 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?
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.
Start by the fact that in their system you are just a random number that is generated at the moment you arrive in their website. They make very easy to pay without having to use any of your personal data, like Credit Card. Overall I think if a company put so much effort on that side, they simply don't have any data to log, or if they do is pretty anonymous anyway :)
While their account privacy policy is commendable, it isn't a proof for not collecting logs.
Even without personal details you can collect quite a lot of data - ip address that uses certain VPN account, which servers it talks to while using vpn, at what hours, at what intervals, also all the plaintext data exchanged between client and server. A lot of data that someone (who might already have your ip address mapped to your personal info, for example your ISP, or an online store where you shopped something before you turned on the VPN) would be willing to pay good money for. And companies like money.
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.
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.
I find it odd that EU is judged by efforts that have time and time again _failed_, when I'd see that as a perfect example of a system actually working, because people do have the power to stop hostile legislation, whereas I see no such thing at all in the US.
Yup, I don't get someone who would look at the US and say that their government overreach is particularly bad compared to the rest of the "first world". For example, the UK is arresting people for getting too spicy in school Facebook groups[1]. It just feels like "grass is greener" mentality because folks on here are most familiar with US political issues.
Do the immigration police in UK also murder their own citizens in broad daylight? What about incarceration (and falsely incarcerated) rates? What about general cases of police brutality? What about pedophile-run government where nobody ever gets arrested? What about a government that's bailing out known criminals for money? Or one that rug pulls its own citizens via crypto scams, phone scams, citizenship scams? USA is so far beyond comparison to any other country that it's not even funny. The whole place is a con artists paradise, run by con artists, for con artists.
Not to mention that they are actively hostile towards its own allies, threaten to annex ally territory, don't want to help its allies, and then when it can't pull off a war it on its own started, then EU is supposed to come help? And when we don't, we get insulted for not being friendly? Honestly, F USA, and everything that place stands for. What a toxic cesspool of a place.
You're not wrong. But no SaaS is forever. Price rises, bankruptcies, ToS changes, change of CEO etc. Being acquired by a US company is just one of the things that can happen.
For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company
And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...
I'd like to get out of the matrix as much as the next guy, but I haven't found any reliable alternatives that actually provide equivalent services.
And in terms of degoogled phones, I like the idea, but the conspiracy theorist in me tells me, "hhhhmmmm, people are leaving the google / apple ecosystem, and the best phones out there for degooling is Pixel phones by google..."
That's like the best move Google made, their "free" services are the main driver for selling their phones.
Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.
You misunderstand this. Yes, there have been moves by some in the EU to reduce privacy, but they face resistance and have actually been repelled often. The ChatControl debacle you mention is one such instance. And on the other hand, sometimes there is actual progress, like with GDPR.
But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.
I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.
> For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer.
Other than them suddenly and arbitrarily deleting your account on a week's notice if you chose to have been born in the wrong country, they're great.
Arbitrarily because you can always email them and explain why you chose to be born in the wrong country and how you're actually one of the good ones.
But you don't understand: most of their employees are from a country that the wrong country is currently in conflict with, so they can't stand idly by while you sit there with your birth certificate hanging over you.
> the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection
This 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.
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...
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.
just to piggyback off of this, theres also Pikapods (based in malta i think) that have about 100 or so self-hosted apps that can be installed with one-click and then you just pay depending on what you use. im more into self-hosting on my own hardware but its a nice option for people who want to get their feet wet or that dont have the time to manage a VPS themselves
Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.
There are some downsides, though:
- No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files
- Data is not encrypted
Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.
Not a fan of Mailbox.org. It's Nextcloud for starters. The UX is clunky. They feel a 30 day web app session expiry is perfectly fine.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
"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."
Frankly many in the US are over the Trump administration and I expect a massive backlash in the midterms. Do what you want of course but I think the descent of the US is slowing and there will be a return to normalcy after this admin.
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.
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.
I like privacy, but a service that's focused on maximum possible privacy for its users paints a target on its back for any three-letter agency, as it will attract a large contingent of unsavoury people.
I just onboarded and was dumbfounded that they do not allow for proper calendar exposure other than a fully public link! The claim of zero knowledge is super cute, for those that need it, but I need a provider which allows me to integrate the calendar elsewhere, as those will not magically move into Proton. I guess I am not in their target market.
Seconding this - reasonable pricing and I haven't had any issues at all with the service. I haven't used FastMail but most things I read suggest they are very similar in terms of what they offer so I would think Mailbox is a good EU alternative for someone who likes FastMail. (There are also other EU providers like Tuta but with slightly different trade-offs, ie, more emphasis on privacy but at the expense of IMAP/SMTP support.)
I switched to mailbox recently and I'm finding it quite good. I set it up with a custom domain, and that did require a bit of fuzting around, but the friction there was almost all on the side of my VPS hosting service, not Mailbox's fault.
Not sure why I got downvoted for saying none of the dozen alternatives people have suggested are anything close to Fastmail. I guess none of you have even tried Fastmail. I am a big fan of its UI, and they have recently released and official Linux client.
There are reasons other than privacy to move to non-US companies: e.g. not wanting contribute to the US economy and the further expansion of US tech companies. This is my main motivation in fact.
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
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.
"Migrating to the EU" is serving a self-fulfilling delusion just as joining the so -called revolutionary forces after WW2 and moving to eastern Europe.
The EU does everything to de-industrialize itself and protect its ground by using surveillance tools branded as "child protection" rules.
Europeans don't have any tradition in thinking in freedom, in civil rights, in having a state that isn't there to spoil you, but grant basic service to allow you to shape your life the way you want it. Instead, Europeans hunger for "the state", thrive under more and more "protection rules" and supervision over the economy.
Anything and everything that requires financial and economic freedom is deemed suspicious and under the disguise of equality needs to be taxed into the ground.
Almost no one takes offense by the fact that the predominant topics in the EU center around perceived life-style threads all caused by one person thousands of miles away while wondering that the quality of life and public service going down the hill and every still existing local newspaper looks like an international outlet like New York Times: local topics don't exist. Anything and everything has to be linked to something that can be linked to "the fight against XYZ" not simply pragmatism or anything rational.
In Germany there is a former major party imploding in record time, having absolutely no representation anymore. And what these radicals do, is building a self-serving kraken, that checks off any and every checkmark of an totalitarian playbook.
And this shall be the basis for making my future depend an services having to exist within these given circumstances?
The genius thing about US constitution is the inherit limitation of terms. You see exactly the opposite in anything and everything in the EU and Germany. 14 or 16+ years of being in control means there was never any need to readjust.
I am more than happy and willing to move everything out of the EU.
Given the fact that europeans think, that a "Hosted in the EU" service is 100% European (whatever the term means) is some sort of discriminatory - something that is dealing with the double standard rampant in the EU.
BTW, I am still waiting for full autonomy: nothing from Github or any open source project that traces back to Github was used in this service.
European arrogance is so disgusting. Instead of simply changing the tune and accepting the fact, that different circumstances lead to different results, there is some sort of ego distorting the decision making process.
How much more evidence is needed, that the EU is lost compared to services done in the US? And you should look at the whole picture, instead of using your gut to draw conclusions.
I admire and acknowledge anything and everything that has been achieved in the US in regards to Computer Science.
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.
I agree, and moved to the EU from the US for related reasons, but Von der Leyen's entire strategy for handling Trump seems to be immediate capitulation to horrendously one-sided deals, which doesn't give a lot of confidence.
Trump will be gone in 2028 and policies may radically change depending on who replaces him. There is no change on the horizon in the EU when Von Der Leyen is replaced (she is just the current public face of the blob...)
Do you believe this ? Even if the Americans get out of their zombie existence and get out to vote (on another candidate), I cannot imagine Trump will accept an election loss.
(A reminder: The US has had a 24% drop in the Liberal Democracy Index score in just one year and your supreme court is owned)
That video is from 11 months ago, long before Trump was elected for his second term. Once was an anomaly. Twice is nearly a pattern but not an anomaly. Third time is an established pattern.
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.
You have no idea what you are talking about, really. We don’t "frequently" pass such laws. Nobody is accessing private messages, even if there have been such attempts.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.
I don't think the french as a whole believe that. A lot of people in France are highly critical of the way the current government (and how it is more and more far right leaning) has been handling things in the last decade. There is a big issue of the police forces syndicates being highly far right biased which doesn't help.
None of the issues highlighted are because of the last decade of any alleged "far right leaning". In fact things have probably improved compared to a few decades ago.
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.
Capital flows to where it enjoys the greatest returns. That is not Europe, not now nor in any foreseeable future. There is no reason for a skilled professional interested in making money to go there.
I don't think that this was the intention of the original blog post. It's about _digital_ migration for tech savvy folks who want to decouple from us-based tech monopolists.
I can recommend:
* Hetzner.de for servers (I've been using their physical servers for many years now, incredible performance per € spent)
* Fernand as your CRM, it's smooth and nice and so much better and faster than all the zendesks and freshdesks it's not even funny. (https://getfernand.com/)
* AISLER if you design electronics and need to make PCBs (https://aisler.net/)
> 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
I 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?
I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.
I use mailbox for the past few years and I think it's the best option out there. But they have one major issue, which is that anyone can impersonate your domain:
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
I think that is not up to date. Mailbox publishes DKIM records: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...
SPF is here https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...
DMARC is up to the domain owner to set.
Oof, what a drag
Have been using mailbox.org with a custom domain (including catch-all wildcard) for the last 5 years or so, so it's definitely possible and as far I remember quite straightforward.
My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).
When you have a custom domain you can list @mydomain.com as sending domain allowing you every string before the at character. So that means you could use 50 different domains with infinite adresses on these domains.
The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.
Can confirm, I use mailbox.org with my own domain and can send from any *@mydomain
Yea been using mailbox.org for couple months and i can send from any address of my own domain...this is bad article. He probably doesn't know how to.
Hmmm this looks like a really nice option! Any issues with deliverability?
I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.
SPF or DKIM maybe?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492820
Works for me as well.
...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)
Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.
If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)
Fastmails servers are in the US IIRC.
While I agree in principle, I have to remind you (and to myself) that Australia is part of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access
As EU citizen I at least got some influence into EU policy. A government far away doesn't even have to pretend to care about me.
You have influence over policy? Wow. What do you do?
The EU has about 450 million citizens, which of course limits my direct vote. Downside of a democracy (EU is a complicated democracy, but still) is that a majority probably has other priorities than me.
However there are many ways to impact policy makers. From individual contact to impact on the public debate. Even a small post here may lead to people considering their vote or contacting a local or EU parliamentarian, which in sum pushes the needle. In the end they are receptive, as they need the votes by the people.
It's long and tedious and not all things go anywhere, but then again: I am just one in 450 millionand for most of those priority is to have a Job which pays the rent and food and thus I have to break it down to be relevant for them.
The actual answer as to how much you influence policy is: none at all.
The European commission proposes laws. European commissioners are proposed through existing EU institutions. They are not voted in.
You vote for MEPs, who discuss laws, pass them, perhaps amending them. They do not propose them.
And by the way, this is not democracy, it is 'representative democracy' - you vote for one person to represent you and 100,000s of others for all the decisions an MEP makes over their 5 year term. They are not bound in any way to stick to their campaign promises.
Anyway, you might be happy or not about the laws these unelected bodies pass - I'm glad you seem happy about it. You might or might not see Europe as a triumph for its subjects. But there is no need to kid yourself or others that you have any impact over policy.
The European commission are appointed by the Council of the EU which is composed by elected individual member countries' heads of government. Commissioners also need to be individually approved by the European Parliament which is directly elected.
Representative democracy is democracy. Basically all nation level democratic governments are representative democracies.
Being a cynic doesn't make you look clever.
Do you think you influence policy too?
Do you think I'm being cynical or realistic if I say I don't think I influence any political decisions?
EU has citizenship initiatives. Citizens can propose changes to the law and the parliament has to discuss it.
Stop Killing Games movement actually got a foothold.
EU as every healthy democracy has also non-elected experts (just like judiciary side) in its organs who can create law proposals. That's how we got USB-C and GDPR.
I do think you're cynical and wrong if you think you can't influence any political decisions on the EU level.
Fastmail runs exclusively of AWS in the US.
I looked into this, there are lots of people in forums discussing/ asking for EU based servers.
https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.
Used them in my last project for around 5 years. They were boring in a good way and inexpensive.
I use them too. Highly recommend. Have never had an issue with them.
Hetzner and Bunny are solid choices for EU projects.
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.
Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?
For me:
- SES was a big one. There was no affordable alternative at my (not big, not small) scale.
- I'm still waning myself personally of GMail. That dependency took decades to build and it will take years for all ties to sever.
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 / Drive
NameCheap / GoDaddy → Infomaniak
Google Maps → TomTom
Google Chrome → Vivaldi
Google 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.
To you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work?
I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.
When first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using
At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it
I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere
If you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain
This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.
I've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it.
One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.
> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there
pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.
I've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/).
I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)
I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.
I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.
Lyft pays people to help map in OSM. meta and Microsoft have both made big contributions as well (like allowing the use of Bing imagery)
Amazon also uses and contributes edits to OSM.
It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.
New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.
That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.
[delayed]
> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.
It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).
I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.
What do you miss about Google Maps in OSM? Just business information (schedules, contact info, reviews...), or something else?
Somebody else, but there is no good OS mobile app for OSM. CoMaps is clunky currently.
For Photos, consider Ente (e2ee).
Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.
Their whole point was to avoid US companies.
Consider ecosia for search. It's not perfect but is decent for most general searches
> avoid giving money
You're paying for any of these?
Most of those services are paid by terrible people when you use them.
Look at their revenue breakdowns.
I've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do - gdrive style storage - dropbox style synced folders - photo app/backups - PC folder backups with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux
Hasn't TomTom completely pivoted to OpenStreetMap? From direct contact, I know that they are very active in OSM communities now.
TomTom isn't OSM, they just use OSM as one input among many into their mapping model. OSM has significant limitations as a standalone mapping model but many companies find it useful for augmenting more sophisticated mapping models.
OSM is one of multiple data sources for TomTom.
Yeah I was thinking of getting infomaniak for my mail. I don't really care for the encryption thing of proton (all email comes in in plain text anyway!) and I want to just be able to do plain imap without bridges.
But their stuff just feels a bit weird somehow. I didn't really want to commit yet. I'm glad to hear you had good experiences.
Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming. Everything is done e2ee where possible. In case of mail, when the peer has no Proton, mail is indeed send plaintext.
Mail is stored e2ee on server, so not even Proton can read it. Proton mail has also made PGP very easy to use. It’s Swiss based and a foundation, not a corporation. They’ve done this so they cannot easily be bought.
It ticks most boxes in terms of privacy and security.
I love Proton but it's really low on usability since their calendar doesn't integrate with anything (by design). If you are used to managing a busy calendar it's quite a shock. And their docs and sheets apps are extremely minimal and basic.
And of course the recent allegations that they hand over your metadata on >90% of requests. See https://x.com/DoingFedTime/status/2030108076531995016
> Mail is stored e2ee on server
Exclusively, or do they keep caches around? I am asking since everything is clear text in the webmail. I wonder if they handle the rare case of proton to proton (encrypted) mail differently from regular unencrypted mail. I assume they have to decrypt a master key stored on the server with your password, and then decrypt every encrypted email on the fly on the server, or they have to send the master key to the client side.
Now think that through when you have thousands of searchable e-mails, sorted arbitrarily. I won't say it is impossible, but I think that maintaining plain text indexes rather than encrypted ones are really tempting.
You’re post is full of misconceptions and mistakes.
Mail is stored e2ee exculsively. The’ve been summoned to hand over mail many times, which they weren’t able to do. Quick search on Ecosia and find the articles.
They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t. The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Part of the password is used to decrypt the data.
Search is done client side. You have to download a big search index in order to have proper search. The iOS app doesn’t support downloading the index so search is limited there.
Please think and do some work before you reply.
> They don’t have a master key or else the whole e2ee story is a fad, which it isn’t
You can store an encrypted master key (like Luks), download that key to the client and decrypt it there. Or you can have it in decrypted in server memory, but only during an interactive session with the user. But that quickly turns into a fad, as you pointed out, which was exactly my question.
> The Proton code is in Github so you can check how it works yourself. Please think and do some work before you reply.
I asked a simple question, so that at others could chime in about the exact details and limits. I don't understand why that was highly offensive to you, but I assume it is something like a Monday Mood.
> Proton has mail, calendar, drive, docs, sheets and more coming
As of today, there is no official Proton Drive client for Linux that I'm aware of. There is unofficial support via Rclone, but it is still beta and I try to avoid mounting via Rclone anyway. I recall that it wasn't a really convincing experience when I tried it with OneDrive.
Proton Drive for Linux (and Drive SDK) are announced for this year. Unfortunately not more specifically than “this year”.
Proton is moving out of Swiss, because of privacy concerns and new laws...
Just fyi
They aren’t. They do have made their IT such that they can move very easily. If the Swiss government will pass worse privacy laws, Proton said they will move to Norway or Germany.
I'm using it Infomaniak, including their KDrive as a Dropbox replacement (with 2TB of data). I've even used their video conferencing app. No complaints so far. All seems to work just fine.
The infomaniak KDrive has also pretty great pricing and surprisingly great linux client (it even supports “online/offline” files.
I can't recommend Immich enough if you want to move off Google Photos.
Pcloud is a security nightmare. If you really have to use it, add your own crypto layer on top of it.
Gocryptfs works well for that.
If you're going through all that effort why not migrate to open-source/self-hosted?
Email? The rest of your life will be spent wondering if anyone got your message or if you've missed something important.
Registrar, and search? Not possible.
Maps? Paper would be more practical.
Browser, done.
Git, a lot of extra work for no gain.
>Maps? Paper would be more practical.
On the contrary, maps are (IMO) one domain where FOSS is genuinely better. OpenStreetMap data is far more detailed than any corporate map, and the available clients (Osmand in particular) are far more powerful.
You-know-who can only compete because of its (admittedly useful) data on businesses. And, alas, because of ignorance among normies, many of whom are still clueless that, for example, for hiking or outdoor wayfinding, there are much better alternatives available.
We weren't talking FOSS, we were talking self-hosted, and self-hosting OSM is ridiculous, especially if you want to do routing.
The maps can be considered metadata. The data is the points and tracks, which should be self-hostable. I have them synced locally (desktop-mobile). The setup was admittedly an absolute PITA involving shell scripting and Python.
The map data is great but I guess I really mean navigation, which is... not great.
Yes, that's what's commonly said.
Some anecdata I can offer: since last year I have used exclusively Osmand for navigating over 3000 km of cycle touring, on roads and paths of all types. The most common problem that arises is wrongly tagged surfaces (and occasionally access rights) for tracks and paths, i.e. for "roads" that do not even appear on the corporate maps. There is no comparison in terms of detail. Obviously this is less relevant for regular car drivers.
And certainly the situation for FOSS public-transit navigation is still quite poor.
I am a little optimistic about radicle for Git
Google has two products without competition: YouTube and Google Maps.
Don't waste your time trying different map services.
Everything else is super easy to switch to better alternatives, especially search, e-mail and browser.
Organic Maps is great for offline. It even did better directions in Europe recently, because Google Maps does not have an "avoid unpaved roads" option.
Apple Maps does driving directions way better in general. It does foreign pronunciations better too IIRC. It's even not bad as a PWA on Android ( https://maps.apple.com ).
Google Maps loves to say take eg "exit Via Emilio Enrico" on some random roundabout in some random Italian town, seemingly with no idea that there are big signs to eg "VERONA". The street name is often totally useless.
I also find Google Maps does a great job at directing me into traffic. Like, not unexpected traffic at all.
Google Maps is great at giving you terrible recommendations because of the heavily, heavily filtered/gamed reviews however. Nothing more untrustworthy than a 4.7 star review on Google.
And of course there is also Mapy, HERE, TomTom etc...
For email I have been quite pleased with RunBox (Norway)
> Next, I’m thinking of moving away from Google Photos. I’m considering pCloud for that.
Maybe try Immich?
I'm in the process of migrating to self-hosted immich and the experience is being great so far. If you have a beefy home lab it is incredibly fast and performant. One thing to mention is that you should have a good backup strategy not to risk losing your photo library
Seconded.
This is why I'm sticking to Spotify.
Maybe corporations can start to market this: we are not an American company.
This doesn't make a lot of sense:
"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."
So in an effort to veer from the US based on idealogical positions you wouldn't support your own countrymen because you think in some future state that said copmany might hypothetically move to the US?
Canadians unable to support Canadians is what everyone around the world should read from this comment. Tall Poppy Syndrome in its purest.
Agreed, this is a VERY odd statement. There are a bunch of Canadian companies that have been here for a long time. I don't have the data but would DNS and hosting providers like EasyDNS and HostPappa really have primarily US customers?
>What utter BS
Consider for a moment how you would feel if, after carefully composing and sharing your thoughts in good faith, you received this response.
Im sorry but saying you won't support your own people because you THINK they MIGHT move to the US is BS (I removed it originally because I toned down my knee jerk reaction but I defend it as you brought it up). I hope OP has enough emotional capability to handle some gentle feedback.
FWIW in case you are unfamiliar with it -- Canada has a history of not supporting its own products and companies - so this sentiment expressed above is tough one to swallow given the exceptional talent and capability of Canadians and some countries efforts to undermine that.
> Tall Poppy Syndrome
I learned something new today, thanks! I did face this a LOT in Canadian workforce, never knew it had a term, but the way you get undermined and attacked for not being an average is crazy, taking/sharing the credit, and pushing you on the sides, excluding you from meetings and all shenanigans haha. Completely the opposite in the US, not just productivity wise, but US companies embrace individualism and “as long as you get shit done”, go wild! It’s why US companies do better, I doubt it’s the market size as always brought as a justification, I am sure if Canadian companies did better they will have US based customers too just like Switzerland had European ones.
Isn't it compounded with issue that something like 75% of UW grads move to the US for work?
Im not sure I follow your point exactly?
> For various reasons
Because 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
/r/BuyFromEU is a continuous enumeration of individuals posting from what US services to EU services they moved. I agree that these posts get uninteresting once you have seen a few. I would be more interested in I have used European service X for 6 months, these are the up/downsides I found, since they actually help people picking alternatives.
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
Ecosia is just Google/Bing depending on location.
Qwant is the way to go
Both use Google and Bing, though not exclusively, and both joined efforts to create the new, independent EUSP index.
Sources for Ecosia indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia#Ecosia
Sources for Qwant indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Development
EUSP: https://www.eu-searchperspective.com
Thanks, uruky sounds quite promising, giving it a try
Thanks, please reach out with any suggestions or problems you find!
For anyone who wants some eco-optimism, Ecosia has a youtube channel where they film their reforestation efforts.
And a nice blog [1] too!
[1]: https://blog.ecosia.org
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.
>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?
This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.
It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
His comment did not even mention the US. Only critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU. One of the issues with modern politics is everyone wants to deflect.
I need to host my emails somewhere. This means that you can't reject the EU in isolation, you have to compare it to the alternatives. And the most prevalent alternative is the US
Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about
Switzerland, maybe? I've been a happy migadu.com customer for years already.
Funny enough, they mention moving to ProtonMail which is at least based out of Switzerland. It makes this whole chain a bit funny, but I don't blame the commenter for not breaking down every service the OP talked about and the OP did shorthand it to "Migrating to the EU", so fair enough.
Servers of migadu are in france actually
Didn't proton fold like a wet napkin when they were asked for information about their users? What I mean is: Switzerland as a whole is probably the wrong metric...
Switzerland - as well as EU based providers - have to comply with court orders. And the EU as well as Switzerland issue court orders upon request from friendly foreign states ("Rechtshilfeersuchen" in german) - such as the US.
Wasn't Proton launched as a "your data is encrypted at rest, we could never access it without your consent"? The implication being that even if they received said court orders, they didn't have anything to give. Am I misremembering that?
They encrypt your data insofar as your email, files, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't have information potentially useful to the authorities. See the recent headline where they revealed a user's payment information allowing them to be identified.
These are also political decisions and the EU is much more powerful politically than Switzerland so if your adversary is the US and they're willing to use lawfare or more than you should probably go with the EU and not Switzerland. Germany is considered one of the most robust legal systems for privacy.
But there is always risk no matter what you do.
Anywhere you can rent a VPS or dedicated server, install exim or mox or mailcow. Configure dns correctly and you're good to go
In email world, this is as far from 'good to go' as you can get. Good luck getting anyone to read your emails this way.
Do you run your email server? I run two, have next to no problems (the key is in setting up DNS correctly, as I mentioned) and keep getting told this by people who have never tried.
More elaboration on what’s involved in “correctly” would probably drive the point home — “this works because” vs “works for me.”
I made sure to include the word correctly in the reply. Mox mailserver tells you exactly what to do. I think mailcow does as well. A lot of people don't do it and then tell others that selfhosting email with good deliverability is impossible. You set it up once and you're good to go
Do any of your emails actually make it into an inbox though? I did this for a server and I couldn't even get it to land in spam on gmail.
Yes but you may need the IPs to warm up and build some reputation, depending where you setup your server the IPs may be burned. Check logs and reputation with some of the postmaster tools the major providers offer and with the services that allow looking up an IP. senderscore used to be convenient to use now it displays a stupid contact form when you try to check an IP, there are others.
To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.
Yes they do. I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start, and configure DNS correctly, it's generally fine.
The post is about moving stuff from US to EU, so it's not like the US is brought up out of nowhere.
The comment does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a thread where the topic is, eminently, migrating away from US services to EU ones.
>The comment does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a thread where the topic is, eminently, migrating away from US services to EU ones.
Even then, there's no interesting conversation to be had unless we pretend it does.
I, and apparently many others in this thread, disagree.
I personally found some interesting comments here, including but not limited to services based off EU that I can use.
If you find it uninteresting, you should stop wasting your time in it and go do something more productive with your time.
Unless, of course, you just want to do some "concern trolling". You know, the "just asking questions" and "just noticing" behavior.
I'll be charitable and presume you are talking in this thread accidentally, and will find your way to more productive activities instead.
> critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU
What?
It's happening in the EU too, just not at such a fast pace than in other regions. And it's still far away from authoritarianism.
Currently it's just smaller pieces and no bigger agenda is visible (or even exiting). But there are constantly new regulations that would make an authoritarian coup (like currently in the US) easier.
Lol what does ICE have to do with a local police officer being able to bully a tech worker into providing your private communications?
what example are you talking about? assuming it's non-UK would like to read about it.
> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order
The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.
Not really.
Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.
It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:
1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.
2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.
3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals
There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.
The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.
Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.
Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.
See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.
I agree that presidential systems in particular are problematic, and the EU is lucky that Germany and France use parliamentary systems. But the nasty thing about populism is that it happens in waves and it does overtake parliaments. We need only look at what happened to the UK with Brexit for a recent example. It's not hard to imagine that a wave of far-right populism could one day overtake Germany, or send France's RN, Austria's FPO or Poland's PIS to a majority position.
We can cross our fingers and hope that nobody would work with them (I know that Germany's parties all have a pinky promise not to work with AfD), but it was only 10 years ago that everyone in the US was laughing at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and now here we are, much sobered. These things happen, and AfD, or RN, or whoever, could wreak havoc to the EU from within the EU if they took power and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs and more.
Well nobody has figured out the perfect political system yet.
Except the Swiss.
Europeans are so blind to how they are essentially on the same path as the US, the US just got there first.
While there is a trend toward the right in many (not all) EU countries, it's a far cry from the shit show on the other side of the Atlantic.
Most European countries have functioning legal and electoral systems, and more than two parties. On top of that, constitutional courts aren't political appointments.
So it would be incredibly hard for a political entity like AfD or RN to gain full and absolute power like the orange has achieved. Even in the worst cases, those parties usually only have ~30% popular support at most, which usually translates to at most ~30-40% of seats in parliament. Which means they cannot even get parliamentary majority, and probably can't get head of state either.
Americans just like to pretend things aren't that bad and they aren't the only ones falling into the abyss.
Could you explain to me (non-US and non-EU resident), how people in EU are okay with mandatory photo scanning on your devices(aka CSAM protection)?
Who does this weird proposals like Chat Control?
AFAIK, it is not "alt-right" parties - so it really does not clicking for me, why AfD and others constantly brought in during online privacy discussions?
Can you remind me when those actually passed? I can pull equally up equally ridiculous bills from the US that never came to fruition.
I'm not pretending things aren't bad, I'm pointing out that things could be bad for you as well. America had functioning legal and electoral systems too, and we only need to look at Brexit for a shining example of how parliamentary systems can also fail to resist a populist wave. By refusing to acknowledge that, you look no wiser than the Americans who were laughing at the idea of a Donald Trump presidency just ten years ago.
> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
AFAIK there's no murdering of citizens going on in any EU member country by the same countries government at the moment.
>(though currently a little bit less marked)
Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.
The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.
> The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.
I wish there was an easy way for me to bet against the imminent fall of the United States as predicted by so many internet commenters. I don’t like what the current administration is doing, either, but I would readily bet against all of these “the end is just around the corner” or “the empire is dying” takes in a heartbeat.
I didn't say the US is finished, I said it was finished as a liberal democracy.
It's already slid in to 'electoral democracy' instead of 'liberal democracy' the difference between the two is how 'rule of law' is prioritised and the balance between checks and balances between institutions is enforced.
https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf
Not quibbling but to be fair that report shows problems in Europe too, not the same speed of change, and its a different situation, but if you care about democracy its not great.
>The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states
But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.
EU did not force Romania. Romania itself annulled them because Russian intervention happened.
Sure that happened :)
Yes, it sure did. Read my comment on your original post.
What actually happened was that former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly stated on French TV in January 2025 that if the AfD won in Germany, elections there could also be annulled by the EU "as was done in Romania". That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen, he did not represent the EU in any capacity, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the EU pressured Romania. Of course, post-truth political movements run with a distorted version of this story to play the victim.
Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.
Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.
Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.
Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!
From e.g. Wikipedia:
>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls
D'oh!
>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen
How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?
And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.
Trends are various. You had Poland remove rightwing goverment 2 years ago (yes and elect righwing president few months ago). Romania electing a European centric president.
We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.
I'm not advertising the US here or trying to troll. I'm an European pointing out things about the European system that many here will not have thought about.
>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.
Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?
I’m in the US and generally pretty level-headed. Nothing makes me become a red-blooded patriot nationalist temporarily faster than seeing Europeans completely ignore the similarities in our political ills. It always boils down to, “but it’s the good kind of authoritarianism we have that preserves social order!!!” as if that has never failed to produce desired results. Thanks for being much more rational. We have a concerning political trend here in the US, it can’t be denied, but the EU is following in step.
Yeah, it's really bizarre how this has to be turned into a competition. We have stupid problems in the EU that don't exist in the US and vice-versa.
The way this particular part of our system works is downright horrifying, but it's exotic enough that very few people (even lawyers) will be familiar with it.
Sorry what? While there are right wing idiots in various governments in the EU, the Trump admin is on a completely different level. Also the bosses of big tech are clamouring over each other to s** him off.
I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.
Man this whole article and your comment just makes me picture that meme with the fat guy open-mouth drinking from a pipe labelled "media".
By the way, sex him off? Trying to decipher the number of characters
Just saying, the vast majority of services people are moving from would be US based given it is where all of big tech comes from. So comparing it to the US is relevant?
If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
>If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.
I'm not trying to say anything about anyone else besides the EU. Therefore I'm certainly not trying to compare EU to anyone else.
I am an European pointing out issues with the local system, issues that many commenters here clearly aren't aware of given how many replies seem to think that they'll be just fine as long as they don't host in Hungary.
The US is sliding to a place that many EU countries are happily occupying and pontificating from
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/since-20...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/17/refugees-jew...
What a disingenuous comparison. The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years. In contrast, the corresponding wiki article on the US ("Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States" [1]) estimates more than 900 deaths per year. Indeed, the number of slayings is so great that the article does not tabulate the sum in a single table (as the German article does) but instead links to separate wiki articles with tabulated results by month.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...
>The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years
I think we can probably agree that this number is not very accurate.
Over the last 100 years, almost certainly not. For the most recent decade? Yes, of course I would expect these statistics to be fairly accurate.
Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.
> 552 people over the last 100 years
What a disingenuous comment. Do we really think that is the case?
You ignored my other link. Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry. Yet, Denmark gleefully does that.
Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.
It's your source, not mine; if you have a better one, post it. I won't do your own research for you.
> Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.
This is either disingenuous or misunderstands the nature of European constitutional monarchies.
Don't discount that it could be both. It's still early in some parts of the US, they might not have had their coffee yet.
> Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry
The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.
And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?
Per capita vs absolute numbers seems particularly relevant here.
There are four times as many people in the US.
Germany has four cities with around a million people.
The U.S. has at least 15.
Also, absolute numbers don't reflect justified shootings, which is an entirely different and much more nuanced conversation.
No part of this should be taken to mean that I don't think there's a problem in the US, I just object to complex issues being overly simplified.
Per capita vs absolute numbers are not especially relevant in this case. The figures differ by orders of magnitude.
> 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?
(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:
> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]
> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]
> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:
* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...
The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.
For anyone wondering:
EAW = European Arrest Warrant
EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)
CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)
Also IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer. If you really want to guard yourself from a legal standpoint, write the full sentence. "IANAL" could mean anything.
That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.
Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.
Yeah, but you also have Hungary who can decide to do things the same way they're done in Sweden and Finland.
So don’t host your stuff in Hungary?
Yeah I think this basically answers this entire sub-thread
Hungary can send an EIO to France or Germany, and the consistent trend has been to reduce the ability of executing states to review these requests.
Sure, those EIO will be held if Hungary starts applying EIO that it got (e.g. for former Ministry of Justice of Poland which awaits trail, he sits comfortably in Hungary).
Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.
There’s a concerning trend of EIOs issued by Hungary being enforced in France and Germany? What would be an example of this?
This is the best I can give you off the top of my head, but look at which countries are the most active in eurojust :) https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/ar2020/data-annex
An LLM can probably find some better links though.
I think you might be missing the ‘concerning’ part. Which specific cases are concerning? I don’t find it inherently concerning that people can’t escape justice by crossing the Hungarian border, Bonnie and Clyde style.
Too explicitly spell it out, op is saying here that if any one of the 27 countries in the EU decides you are breaking one of their laws, they can have 1 of the other 26 enforce an EIO.
Which would be perfectly fine if your local jurisdiction could still properly review those foreign requests.
EIOs are subject to a dual criminality requirement. So it’s not as if arbitrary Hungarian laws can be applied in France via EIOs. And of course, we all know this is not happening, which is why we get radio silence from the people who are ‘concerned’ about this whenever specifics are requested.
>EIOs are subject to a dual criminality requirement
Dual criminality requirement only applies to non-Annex D crimes. Which is... not many crimes. You seem awfully confident for someone so ill-informed.
>And of course, we all know this is not happening
How would you know that it isn't happening? EIOs are not public!
Annex D is a list of things that are crimes pretty much everywhere.
Not sure what to make of the claim that Hungary might theoretically be enforcing Hungarian law in France. It seems surprising that no-one has noticed any specific consequences of this that you can point to.
The EIO is mostly just a formalization and standardization of a bunch of ad-hoc processes that were already in place. Law enforcement agencies in different European countries do try to assist each other, on the whole.
What you're missing is the erosion of the ability of the executing states to say things like "hey this is sketchy, we think this crime might not have happened", "hey the police department in this particular city is notoriously untrustworthy", or "hey this prosecutor is widely known in the local press to be corrupt and owns a collection of ferraris".
Now foreign authorities are trusted by default and significant parts of their reasoning are not subject to review, that's bad.
So provide some concrete examples of what you’re talking about, if it’s a real concern.
Oh no, that's totally up to you. If you're happy with the courts in your country not being able to review the requests sent from Hungary, that's cool. Without transparent judicial review, how could we even know if the cases are concerning?
EIOs are subject to review by the recipient state. It seems that you can’t point to a single relevant example of a concerning EIO from Hungary.
"Subject to review" means little more than "is the form filled correctly?", it certainly does not mean second-guessing by the courts in the executing state.
Like, yeah, your EIO will be rejected if you don't tick any of the crime-category boxes in the form.
In Hungary, sure. But each country has its own jurisdiction.
Yeah, way to not read the thread.
I'll repeat: EIO
So what? Can you point to a real example where this has been abused or are we discussing hypotheticals?
You can look at past ECHR decisions for countless cases of abuse by various national governments.
You can look at the history of EAW related litigation also, it'll probably prove most informative. Executing states used to constantly deny requests due to judicial review, rules were clarified to remove the possibility of judicial review by executing states.
I was expecting you might have a relevant example that applies to this discussion.
Writing "EAW abuse" into google finds endless lawyer marketing posts. The facts of the first one I clicked on sound pretty bad!
https://greatjames.co.uk/martin-henley-secures-the-dismissal...
> 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?
Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...
Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?
Don't forget civil forfeiture, which can (an does) happen whether they think you're an enemy or not.
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
You are technically correct but seem to be applying common law standards to civil law countries.
Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.
This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.
You forgot about the Nordic countries.
US legal protections do not apply to EU citizens keeping their data in the US, do they?
So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?
The geo-location of where you keep your data is irrelevant to US legal reach.
They don't, they don't even apply to EU citizens keeping their (our, in fact) data on our (EU's servers) if what we're doing happens to cross some interests of the US Government. I mean, there are some legal "protections" in place for that, but notice the quotes. Thinking otherwise is delusional, but, hey, people should be allowed to enjoy the liberty of their slightly larger iron bird-cage.
At least there is still the rule of law and democracy in the EU
The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.
The US is at position 57 in the world free speech index. Virtually all EU countries do better and a bunch are top 10:
https://rsf.org/en/index
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
But their free speech protects bribing the politicians with campaign donations. It's true that we don't have such advanced laws over here.
You linked to a site about press freedom, which is a subset of free speech and not generally what Americans are talking about when they talk about freedom of speech.
"Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."
that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.
Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?
Are you sure "the press" doesn't just refer to physical printing presses there?
It's worth reading the specific actions they cite that lower the US's ranking. They include the closure of Voice of America, a government-run propaganda outlet for foreign audiences (and I do think that closure is bad! just not relevant at all to free speech); mergers of several big media conglomerates; not to mention, bafflingly, restrictions on journalism by the Iranian government in Iran, which somehow counts against the US.
None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.
Can you quote it? Did not see any of those things you are mentioning.
https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states
Given the last year, it doesn't seem like any level of suppression of freedom is in fact unthinkable for Americans.
Boiling down the different approaches to freedom of speech to "The baseline level is higher/lower", has always been a pretty simplistic (and if you would actually delve into the topic a little, flat out wrong) view .
Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".
European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.
And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
> Shouting FIRE in a full venue
"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.
> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".
There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.
> freedom of speech
Oh please. There's free speech without a free press (US ranks 57/190, behind Sierra Leone) people are just amplifying the same BS they heard from some ignorant influencer. I would argue even your idea of "active enforced blasphemy laws" shows that. That's worse than useless, that is detrimental to a society (case in point, the current president and his whole cabinet).
https://rsf.org/en/index
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492709
> We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws
In a very narrow interpretation, yes. Everyone with a modicum of common sense would realise that countries with laws on the books against offending religions / inciting hatred against them are still more free than a country where the fucking Bible is cited in court rulings and political speeches, and where there are active laws prohibiting non-religious people from holding office.
One is for keeping the peace, the other is actively meddling religion and politics.
> baseline level of freedom of speech
Being unable to spout Nazi ideology is technically a restriction on freedom of speech, yes. But again, anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a bit of historical understanding) would understand this to be a good thing.
The far right is ascendant in Europe; obviously restrictions on speech haven't prevented that. I am Jewish, I have a strong dislike of Nazis, and yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society. Criminalizing speech doesn't stop people from holding abhorrent beliefs.
This is an aspect of our country that I think most Americans are proud of. Some relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...
My fucking god the American exceptionalism arrogance runs strong.
It's fine if you think the American approach to free speech is bad - you don't have to live here - but please justify that rather than just name-calling.
> yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society
How did that end last time? We know where it ends, we know there's nothing redeeming. Nobody needs Nazis, there is nothing to be gained by engaging with them or giving them a platform.
Weimar Germany had laws against hate speech!
That they did not apply. They let a guy who tried to overthrow the government free to run for election again. This kind of thing should never be allowed. Someone who physically demonstrates they have no business in a democratic society doesn't belong in it.
Is there really? Governments routinely go against the ECHR and the ECJ, and do nothing to rectify past violations when ruled against.
On a national level, sure.
Which cases are you talking about? Compliance with actual court rulings is pretty high.
Want a particularly egregious example? Here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62...
Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.
Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation. Is that a big victory for the rule of law? I think not, the national governments should not be knowingly violating the ECHR in the first place.
It took Ireland years from an ECHR ruling to rule buggery was not unlawful, and Ireland was given a special exemption to the EUs abortion laws which remained in place for 26 years.
Considering who we're comparing it to when discussing this topic: absolutely. Not even a question.
Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.
A whole lot of websites are inaccessible from my country when there's football on, due to a judicial order meant to curb piracy.
The whole deal with Chat Control is also not to be forgotten. I do think you guys see this place with rose tinted glasses sometimes.
Does that football scenario mean that the rule of law doesn't exist or that it does exist and is being enforced?
I agree with you that both of those laws are stupid, but that's a completely separate discussion to what I'm claiming above.
Depends on how you interpret the ECHR.
Does it allow blocking half the internet during football games?
It almost certainly does not: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-115705%...
AFAIU this is common because lower courts often deliberately choose to not try to interpret ECHR, leaving that for appeals courts.
I interpret ECHR as what it is: not a regulatory body by any stretch of the imagination. It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so. You seem to be interpreting it as some sort of an equivalent to the US supreme court, which it is not.
But now we're straying even further from my original argument which boils down to "laws mean something" into arguing the intricacies of how laws are supposed to be changed. I'm not interested in having that discussion, as it has nothing to do with my original claim.
ECHR decisions are (supposed to be) legally binding. If they're not obeyed, that's not a good look for rule of law in Europe.
ECHR decisions are certainly not mere recommendations.
>It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so
ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
According to whom? You?
The only thing ECHR cares about is one piece of "legislation", which is not a law, but a declaration (Declaration of Human Rights), so that you have some sort of internationally recognised body to go to whenever you feel that your local judicial system has done you injustice. That is all it does. That is all it is meant to do. That is the sole reason of its existence. It is not a legislative body at all.
> ECHR can simply invalidate national law.
It can't. You're either making things up or severely misunderstanding the court. It can say "this law doesn't align with the Declaration" and that's it. The law still exists. ECHR relies on signatories being willing to make the necessary changes themselves. Some are and get right on it, some aren't. The election law in my country has lost 5 cases in the ECHR and not a single one of the verdicts are fixed as of now, the oldest of which dates back to 2009. This is horrible, I want to see them fixed, but ECHR can't force us to fix it and we as in the country face 0 consequences for not addressing any of them (as of yet).
There is a separate court called European Court of Justice which is the equivalent of the US supreme court and is tasked with interpreting EU-wide laws and making sure national laws are aligned as much as possible. That is a legislative body with an enforcement mechanism. ECHR is not, you don't know what you're talking about.
For now – the EU is one AfD win away from following in America's footsteps.
The EU governance system is vastly different than the US, and not nearly as fragile. Even if AfD gets sway in one country, it doesn't mean that suddenly they can do anything they want like you saw in the last US election.
My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
> My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.
We've already seen with Brexit that 100% control is not needed in a parliamentary system to destroy a country's livelihood. But my point was that AfD doesn't need something like "presidential control" of the EU, it would just need to start working with other far-right parties in the EU such as Hungary and France's RN to sow chaos from within. Is that very far-fetched? You can't tell me that most of Europe doesn't hold its collective breath at every French election, crossing their fingers that Le Pen's party doesn't win this go around.
AfD is a party in single country in EU.
AfD is a far right populist party in the EU's biggest economic powerhouse country, whose explicit goals are to leave the EU (they probably can't due to the German constitution), exit the eurozone, withdraw from the Paris climate deal, leave NATO, and cozy up with Russia.
It's not hard to imagine what kind of damage they could do to the EU if they took power in Germany and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs, etc.
> What Is An Administrative Warrant?
> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.
> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.
> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.
https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...
No system is perfect. It's more a theoretical risk for now, if you're not running a shady business.
The police will of course decide if you are running a shady business.
Nintendo may also decide this.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...
Without disagreeing at all, can you think of a major jurisdiction that's better? US I basically assume everything is searchable without a warrant, if not leaked on a ex-DOGE intern USB stick.
Who else is there with a major infra ecosystem? Russia? China? UK? Not sure these are better than EU. Japan seems quite inward looking.
This account is sockpuppeting. They are not participating on this site in good faith.
I'd say don't let perfect be the enemy of good/better. Moving from US to EU is a move for the better. But EU isn't perfect, and there might be even better options available, but unless you have them, I'd recommend starting with the move to EU.
Do you seriously think that US requires warrants from US judges to spy on non-citizens abroad? That is 100% false. There is zero protection from the US govt for non-citizens living abroad.
How comfortable are you guys with the fact the US has just partnered with OpenAI to enable mass surveillance?
Not comfortable. But making choices in the real world is about choosing the best option, not the perfect option.
As long as you stay away from questionable behaviour, there is very little chance to encounter the police in the EU or having problems with your privacy. USA is different in that regard. Your existence can be a problem. Or monetary interests will risk your privacy to whoever wants to make money with you.
EU is not perfect, but saver than the USA in those matters (if you want to only invest a reasonable amount of effort and money), which is kinda the point here, isn't it?
EU is not a single uniform blob. There are neighbourhoods where you have to worry about being shot, and there are neighbourhoods where people leave their keys inside their cars.
So, with the police? YMMV.
Obviously, but we are talking about online-activity here, not randomly walking the streets. The normal sketchy cop on the streets will not be accessing your mailbox just because they don't like your skin. Attending certain events would trigger this more likely, but then you should also know how to protect yourself in those cases.
How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?
One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:
- actual incidence is low
- it's not being reported
- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)
> That could have one of three causes:
> - actual incidence is low
> - it's not being reported
> - it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse
Fourth possible cause:
- the EU has 24 official languages
i.e. when it is reported, the number of people who are actually capable of understanding the reporting is only a fraction and rather localized.
Well https://www.devever.net/~hl/xmpp-incident
It's a problem. But it has technical rather than political solutions.
It’s why I don’t trust anyone. Sure, EU has better policies and regulations than the wild west (US/Canada), but they still can and will do monkey business when needed, and they are more twisted about it than the US. The best strategy is to host your own and encrypt all, if it’s too much effort for some services try to use one from a country that has no interest in you (outside the west for example).
This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.
>This isn't a point against EU services compared to the US
In the US the cops actually need a search warrant signed by a judge. In the EU they only sometimes need one.
>Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there
Really? I've always been under the impression that it is courts who issue search warrants in Singapore, not the police or prosecutors.
Does ICE needs something?
Internal combustion engine? Hydrocarbons, I guess.
A judge of a secret court, which are known to never deny any request?
This is simply not correct. Very few "cops" in the US can go to any kind of secret courts.
Also, what you're describing is still infinitely better than the European system! The cops get to issue the warrants themselves.
With any number of intelligence services in the USA I would not really be calmed by the prospect that an ordinary cop cannot do that.
What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
>What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
Yes. The more worrying situation is that Hungary can just decide that their police officers can self-issue search warrants, and then send those around the EU in the form of EIOs.
This is more of a theoretical concern, though.
> Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.
Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Unlike in USA, in general European cops and prosecutors can be punished when they do illegal stuff. That provides better protection then the pretend fairness rule you just cited.
>Generally speaking, I trust EU countries criminal systems more then USA one. USA one is too procedure oriented - like for example with this rule.
Those procedures are written in blood
> you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries.
Are you certain this has happened? I never heard that happen in central Europe. I am pretty certain legislation of other countries is irrelevant, unless it would be an EU regulation - and I am unaware of an EU regulation that could bypass local laws and that has not been made a EU law. Which EU law specifically do you refer to?
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELE...
Generally comfortable.
While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.
I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.
>it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process
Only sort of, because some countries have very weird ideas of what a "judicial process" is.
>I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.
That's fair, but I think it's a mistake. In the worst case the European system grants a village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever, a far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
> That's fair, but I think it's a mistake
I obviously don't share the sentiment.
> village cop in another country the authority to conduct extremely intrusive surveillance on you.
> far more realistic threat for most people than the NSA.
If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
> Criminals can easily co-opt this system and steal your crypto or whatever
I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
>If you think some policeman in a rural Frech village is a bigger threat to your freedom than NSA or other 3-letter agencies from the USA, we can all see who is mistaken in evaluating threats.
Just like the random mugger on the streets of Paris is a far bigger threat to my life and limb than the US with their drones.
You're talking from an ideological perspective, I'm looking at this from a rather more practical angle. It's very possible that your line of thinking leads to a better outcome than mine, or perhaps it doesn't.
>I don't want to say anything, I just wanted to highlight this bit because it made me giggle.
It's really not that funny, cryptocurrency thieves have been bribing cops to rob people at gunpoint https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/09/crooked-cops-stolen-lapt...
Now you can bribe a village cop in Hungary or Romania, and have the French cops do your bidding. This is totally gonna end well!
> You're talking from an ideological perspective
Given your participation in this whole discussion, that was pretty cute.
There nothing else here even worth addressing. This conversation is a waste of time, for both of us.
Have a wonderful rest of your day.
Having been personally touched by this, I see this as an entirely practical and not ideological issue.
It's harder for me to worry about the NSA than people who have already negatively impacted me in the past.
Whataboutyism much?
[Tears of Joy Emoji][Loudly Crying Face Emoji][Loudly Crying Face Emoji][Loudly Crying Face Emoji]
Sounds terrible. Guess we should all just accept the worst of the worst and shut up?
Maybe the motivation is more to stop giving American big tech MAGA fascists money rather than any kind of gain in privacy/security against state level law enforcement.
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.
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.
Buy and support vendors that ship proper Linux laptops. I know of Star labs and Nova Custom in the EU, both use coreboot as well.
You can also get a refurbished thinkpad with Ryzen and 16gb of ram for 400€ or so on european Ebay.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
I never understood why bother with these.
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
Lot of discussion about different privacy laws across jurisdictions, and while I understand a lot of users have different approaches to privacy and opinions on political matters, realistically if your threat model is the NSA or some other three-letter agency:
a) migrating to a different jurisdiction isn't realistically a massive barrier for them (related: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf)
b) if they're taking the time to get a "secret" warrant for you, you have much larger issues. It's like building a car that's resistant to hellfire missiles. It'll help, but if you're getting hellfire missiles thrown at you, you have much larger problems than the structural integrity of your vehicle.
Realistically, there's a reason that a lot of these services are underused. Many of them lack reliable support, many of them aren't as useful, and the vast majority lack the interconnectivity that makes services like Drive and Gmail so useful to the vast majority of consumers. In addition, if your evaluation of the utility of US companies is based on which party is in power, you should know that both parties equally don't care about your privacy, and never have.
If your threat model is the NSA, moving to non-US providers actually lowers the barrier as they no longer have to deal with the US constitution and US citizen data. If your threat model is law enforcement (or border/customs, et al), moving to EU really doesn't cause much in the way of speed bumps.
In my opinion though, the real threat model is not the actual government, its the US corporations. The NSA wont sell your information to any bad actor with a credit card and, realistically, doesn't care about you. But there is much that can be stolen or exploited for financially-motivated bad-actors from non-extradition countries or others with differing interests than your own.
Yeah, sure, but this idea that the government is the threat you're defending against is very American. I'm not saying I trust my government with a lot of my personal data, but they're not the most important threat I'm defending against when I look after my privacy online.
Defeatism; alternatives don't have to be perfect to be useful. In other words, it's a journey, not a destination.
Totally get what you're saying, and improving personal security can also be fun as a mental exercise. It's just there's a lot comments in this thread (hundreds) about how you can migrate EU to escape USG surveillance, which is just not realistic.
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
So where do you want to host your email?
Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…
ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.
Isn't Proton planning to move to .de?
Runbox are a good option - company and servers in Norway: https://runbox.com/
Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.
Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/
Can recommend Runbox for a lot of reasons, but one gotcha that bothered me in day-to-day use was that emails are delayed by a minimum of 30 seconds, with no real upper bound, just a probability curve with, say, the 90th percentile around 5 minutes. On rare occasions, that means OTPs or login links valid for 5 minutes have expired when you get them. Yes I talked to support, yes they cared, yes they subsequently ghosted me when delivering the requested headers of emails delayed for more than 5 minutes which they considered a normal delay "because email wasn't supposed to be real-time" (be that as it may, that doesn't take away the problem that you sit there 30 seconds... 60 seconds... 90 seconds, wondering if you should go do something else while you wait for the confirmation link and get back to your current task later)
Seriously though, nothing but recommended in every other regard. Alias management, anonymous domains you can use, configuring the sender in Thunderbird no problem, everything else was great. My colleagues didn't seem to mind this delay so much as me so it's something to be aware of but might work fine for you
I agree, as a happy Runbox customer of several years. But probably the parent post meant non-EEA too, as Norway is effectively subject to any and all EU regulations.
I'm using Zoho (Indian company, hosted in Europe). Maybe not perfect from a geopolitical pov, but it will do for now.
Singapore, Japan have reliable ISPs.
If the goal is to stay away from US or European influence then the Russians would be a better bet.
Yes but that has the same downsides as China.
And that's pretty much the thread. You're either subject to a large power's jurisdiction or subject to a jurisdiction whose sovereignty is at the pleasure of large powers... Pick a threat model, plan appropriately, and keep things in perspective.
Proton is in Switzerland, which is not part of EU
> how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_?
Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.
> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...
WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?
For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.
> For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.
The Queen died of 8th September 2022.
...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)
If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at rest
And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.
>If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly
Or move to Russia. Not recommending, just saying
Fastmail is australian
But their servers are in the US.
lol, you want trustworthy stability without “too many” regulations. Good luck with that.
I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.
Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.
Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.
devault made sourcehut which I think is hosted in the netherlands
https://sr.ht
I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.
I am boggled by the number of people who see "I really don't want to X" and then reply with "Here's how to easily do X!"
https://tangled.org :) We're hosted in the EU.
Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.
[0] https://forgejo.org
[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues
One of the other comments mentions https://codefloe.com. I haven't tested and haven't yet checked their background, but they seem to allow private repositories.
That sounds good. I'm a bit confused about missing pricing. It says free tier is generous but I can't find any prices.
Take a look at https://www.lcube-webhosting.de/en/svn-hosting-repositoryonl..., starts at 2.90 Euro. No personal experience, but the fact that they are still including SVN support tells you how long-established they are.
Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...
I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.
If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.
Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.
Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.
If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.
I think Sourcehut is EU based now.
For just the basics, self-hosting of git can be pretty easy. I use gitolite on a VPS.
https://gitolite.com/gitolite/
Yes, check out https://www.gitlabhost.com/ It is based in the Netherlands
AFAICS the cheapest option is 250€/month. That seems geared towards businesses, not individuals.
Crazy expensive for small projects
Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.
I don't even update one file. I run it in docker with daily automatic container updates and it has been working fine without issues for years.
Uhm, is it? I have some small repos there, which are private and for my company (ie the website). I didn't encounter any warnings?
Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):
Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.
I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it... Perhaps I'm... Tolerated for the time being?
You are just a glitch in their system. They won't check the content of private repos, and they probably also do not check if there is free software hosted at the same account, so you might have found the hole in their good will.
But their limit seems around 100 MB storage-usage, so I guess it's within their abilities to tolerate some glitches.
Ah ok, well, save for some drafts I wouldn't mind opening the repo which is just a Hugo system intended for a public website anyway. But good to know. Perhaps I will self-host that forgejo instance then :)
Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.
What do you mean by supposedly?
The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.
Just send me an email with your branches URL, and I will pull from it. Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.
>Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.
Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...
To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.
You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.
And the discussion about that PR goes in an email chain too?
You can pull, but having the back and forth documented along with the code is not a nice to have imho
Not that it fits everyone, but that is basically how the Linux kernel is being developed.
Guys, guys, I'm just vibe coding here; just give me your credentials and mothers maiden name and I'll get it myself.
If it is not in git log, a few months down the drain, nobody will read the PR discussion anyway.
Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.
Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.
Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.
I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.
There are the commands git request-pull and git send-email to work with that workflow, though.
gitlab ce is easy to host.
Here's a step-by step guide:
Change directory to your local git repository that you want to share with friends and colleagues and do a bare clone git clone --bare . /tmp/repo.git You just created a copy of the .git folder without all the checked out files.
Upload /tmp/repo.git to your linux server over ssh. Don't have one? Just order a tiny cloud server from Hetzner or another European provider. You can place your git repository anywhere, but the best way is to put it in a separate folder, e.g. /var/git. The command would look like with scp -r /tmp/repo.git me@server:/var/git/.
To share the repository with others, create a group, e.g. groupadd --users me git You will be able to add more users to the group with groupmod.
Your git repository is now writable only by me. To make it writable by the git group, you have to change the group on all files in the repository to git with chgrp -R git /var/repo.git and enable the group write bit on them with chmod -R g+w /var/repo.git.
This fixes the shared access for existing files. For new files, we have to make sure the group write bit is always on by changing UMASK from 022 to 002 in /etc/login.defs.
There is one more trick. For now on, all new files and folders in /var/git will be created with the user's primary group. We could change users to have git as the primary group.
But we can also force all new files and folders to be created with the parent folder's group and not user primary group. For that, set the group sticky bit on all folders in /var/git with find /var/git -type d -exec chmod g+s \{\} +
You are done.
Want to host your git repository online? Install caddy and point to /var/git with something like
Your git repository will be instantly accessible via https://example.com/repo.git.I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.
In Germany, netcup (https://www.netcup.com/) is also quite popular among customers who are
- small or midsize companies, or
- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),
since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.
Also https://uberspace.de/en/
That's the host mentioned 6 times in the article.
> 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.
GDPR is real, and real good
I think GDPR is a good example of why it doesn't really work in practice.
I think the fines and enforcement have been a generally good balance to the status quo in the USA.
But- in practice, is your data materially used differently than in the USA?
The problem is that no one is abandoning facebook, instagram or youtube and that data is being used in the exact same way as it is in the USA- to sell you things and track you across the web. Technically there are more barriers to getting and using that data, but I would argue that it's not a blocker, just an inconvenience to those using that data- it just makes the targeting etc. 10% less accurate. The whole system still runs the exact same way.
And, to make it look like it seem like it works now everyone has to deal with these dumb popups that don't mean anything.
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)
If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?
Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros
I have like 20-ish[0] people using my Migadu account and I've only hit the hard limit once, and it was because one of them was trying to do a mailing list....
Once I got them on a better path, I haven't had any issues. I don't remember what plan exactly, but I've been a customer for a long time, since they were founded pretty much.
0: I host a non-profit and we use my migadu account, since they are broke and I'm too lazy to count the actual number.
> Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.
I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")
Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?
The gift card is a scratch off and has a number that is used to fund your Mullvad balance. So Amazon doesn't know which instance of the gift card you ordered, meaning there's no link to your specific Mullvad account payment.
The authorities might know you ordered a gift card, but not which Mullvad account you funded it with.
Giftcards from Amazon will be enough of a stumbling block to stop copyright trolls and such.
it won't even slow down actual criminal investigations by nation states and might not even stop a determined civil suit.
Or send cash in an envelope.
Doesn't cost extra
No need to share my cc with yet another company.
Shameless plug: if you think about switching from Google Analytics/Hotjar, check out my project[0] (built in EU, started in Romania, now working on it remotely in Netherlands).
If not, happy to hear any criticism or the alternatives you decided to go with instead.
[0]: https://www.uxwizz.com
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.
Haven't used it, but I've been intrigued by git-bug (stores issues in got itself) for years, to use as the issue/pr sync.
Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...
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).
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…
– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE
If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.
You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.
open source is all fun and games until they fork you
I mean you build a base for your oss tooling. You reject a base's notion, what do you expect?
This is already a crazy take on its own, why would a fork have to describe their relation to the parent project front and center? Both the Readme and the comparison page link to the origin blog post [1] that describes the lineage clearly.
But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/
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.
Not sure if it counts, but I’m based in Warsaw, Poland (EU) and working on a free and open-source invoice generator: https://easyinvoicepdf.com
Github: https://github.com/VladSez/easy-invoice-pdf
It doesn’t have any backend and all data is stored in the browser.
> set up catch-all addresses but also send emails from any email address I wanted
I 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
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.
Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.
Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.
One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.
It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.
With google, the problem is that their "AI" can randomly ban you though. And the only recourse is making it to the top of HN. If that even works any more.
> doesn't do anything but make your life harder.
No it also encourages the local market and healthy competition. This way in the future we don't fall into the same enshittification trap.
Honestly, the instability of the political environment in US feels so extreme, that it seems like something could bite you that you didn't even see coming.
Just on the Gmail front: maybe Trump decides to trade embargo you country and pressures Google to cut off email access. Maybe he decides Google needs to be broken up and sold for parts, and Gmail's data goes to Truth Social. Maybe he thinks illegal immigrants or "radical left wing lunatics" shouldn't have access to American email providers and gets Google to start suspending accounts based on a some criteria. Maybe some of this seems far fetched, but we are talking about a president who threatened to to go to war with one of America's closest allies.
The non-American west's exposure to the instability is too high, and already affecting people. Switching software providers where possible is something that can be done quickly, and relatively easily by individuals in the short term.
It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync
i thought the same but ive actually moved twice now. first to protonmail whenever that came out, then again a few years ago to posteo. it actually didnt feel like that much work in the end. i set up forwarding and switched over a few accounts every week. i still kept my gmail account around for years just in case but there will be a point where you just know you have all the important things switched over
Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.
Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.
I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app. My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.
[1] https://email.faircode.eu/
thunderbird (formerly k9 mail) is a decent enough android app, but im not very picky when it comes to email either so keep that in mind. ive been using it with posteo for about 2 years now
Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.
I did it with tons of accounts and services linked. It's not anywhere as daunting as you'd think (and I thought). Although it seems you don't want to move away from it so I'm not sure what point your comment serves to make.
Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.
I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while
In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing
I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.
Shameless plug. We have been working on building a European GitHub alternative for private repos at https://lubeno.dev.
For a European alternative to Google Docs / Notion, we made https://kraa.io/about that might work for you if all you need is a simple editor with collab features.
Migrating away from US services altogether is an admirable goal. In cases where that's not possible, it's still worth moving off the services and platforms offered by large tech companies.
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.
Does their Zimbra implementation support 2FA ?
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.
The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.
It's a team of 10+ people though.
I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.
> "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?
> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
It's a case of "better is not perfect".
Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.
What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.
For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.
There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)
In what sense are governments in the EU more nosy than the one in the US or China?
I think OP means user-friendly in the relationship user-company, not user-government.
> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?
Depends on the country, as much as it would xState in the US.
Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.
Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.
proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.
The stated reason in the article seems like Switzerland should be as good as EU, if not better.
> I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection.
"or switch to European service providers". EU or not, CH is still in Europe, so would qualify?
> 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?
I think he means that he can have a catch-all, but to reply from that address, there needs to be an alias created on the account
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
While it's in your bio, I feel like you should have made it more obvious that this is your company
Just for completeness, both PagerDuty and incident.io offer EU hosting.
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.
> 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 data
How did they prove that? Is such proof even possible?
Start by the fact that in their system you are just a random number that is generated at the moment you arrive in their website. They make very easy to pay without having to use any of your personal data, like Credit Card. Overall I think if a company put so much effort on that side, they simply don't have any data to log, or if they do is pretty anonymous anyway :)
While their account privacy policy is commendable, it isn't a proof for not collecting logs.
Even without personal details you can collect quite a lot of data - ip address that uses certain VPN account, which servers it talks to while using vpn, at what hours, at what intervals, also all the plaintext data exchanged between client and server. A lot of data that someone (who might already have your ip address mapped to your personal info, for example your ISP, or an online store where you shopped something before you turned on the VPN) would be willing to pay good money for. And companies like money.
The usual proof is whether law enforcement agencies can force the company to share such data
For transactional email, Lettermint is a great email broadcaster from the Netherlands. Saying this as a German means they really must be good!
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.
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.
I find it odd that EU is judged by efforts that have time and time again _failed_, when I'd see that as a perfect example of a system actually working, because people do have the power to stop hostile legislation, whereas I see no such thing at all in the US.
Yup, I don't get someone who would look at the US and say that their government overreach is particularly bad compared to the rest of the "first world". For example, the UK is arresting people for getting too spicy in school Facebook groups[1]. It just feels like "grass is greener" mentality because folks on here are most familiar with US political issues.
[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/police-arrest-...
Do the immigration police in UK also murder their own citizens in broad daylight? What about incarceration (and falsely incarcerated) rates? What about general cases of police brutality? What about pedophile-run government where nobody ever gets arrested? What about a government that's bailing out known criminals for money? Or one that rug pulls its own citizens via crypto scams, phone scams, citizenship scams? USA is so far beyond comparison to any other country that it's not even funny. The whole place is a con artists paradise, run by con artists, for con artists.
Not to mention that they are actively hostile towards its own allies, threaten to annex ally territory, don't want to help its allies, and then when it can't pull off a war it on its own started, then EU is supposed to come help? And when we don't, we get insulted for not being friendly? Honestly, F USA, and everything that place stands for. What a toxic cesspool of a place.
For the longest time it was an economic axiom that regulations drive off businesses, and here stronger laws are directly attracting business!
It's the rule of law that attracts business.
This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.
One concern is that if an EU company becomes very successful, it could easily be acquired by a large U.S. corporation.
If you have a good path and a bad path that may or may not converge sometime later on your journey, you still should walk the good path.
You're not wrong. But no SaaS is forever. Price rises, bankruptcies, ToS changes, change of CEO etc. Being acquired by a US company is just one of the things that can happen.
For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company
And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...
Don't worry, EU companies never become that successful
Weird, I've worked for multiple that got acquired by US companies
Big companies never treat your data good. It's better to store it privately :(
I'd like to get out of the matrix as much as the next guy, but I haven't found any reliable alternatives that actually provide equivalent services.
And in terms of degoogled phones, I like the idea, but the conspiracy theorist in me tells me, "hhhhmmmm, people are leaving the google / apple ecosystem, and the best phones out there for degooling is Pixel phones by google..."
That's like the best move Google made, their "free" services are the main driver for selling their phones.
What a waste of time. It's all the same regardless of location. There's better things to do than worry about bogeymen.
You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.
Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.
Australia is a member of five eyes and the US basically treats them like the 51st state.
Heyyy! I thought Canada was the 51st state!? Get in line Aussies!
Oh come on guys, everyone knows it's the UK
> The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection
I 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.
You misunderstand this. Yes, there have been moves by some in the EU to reduce privacy, but they face resistance and have actually been repelled often. The ChatControl debacle you mention is one such instance. And on the other hand, sometimes there is actual progress, like with GDPR.
But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.
I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.
For domains, spread them across multiple registrars.
> For a long time, I was a satisfied Namecheap customer.
Other than them suddenly and arbitrarily deleting your account on a week's notice if you chose to have been born in the wrong country, they're great.
Arbitrarily because you can always email them and explain why you chose to be born in the wrong country and how you're actually one of the good ones.
But you don't understand: most of their employees are from a country that the wrong country is currently in conflict with, so they can't stand idly by while you sit there with your birth certificate hanging over you.
> the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protection
This 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.
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...
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.
just to piggyback off of this, theres also Pikapods (based in malta i think) that have about 100 or so self-hosted apps that can be installed with one-click and then you just pay depending on what you use. im more into self-hosting on my own hardware but its a nice option for people who want to get their feet wet or that dont have the time to manage a VPS themselves
Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.
There are some downsides, though:
Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.I had no idea how cheap this was. Thanks.
I've just rented one a few days ago!
It's not a full-on Nextcloud instance, mind. For example there is no ffmpeg for generating video thumbnails.
But liking it so far
Reminder: Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru) withour any legal basis and past prosecution: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/
Not a fan of Mailbox.org. It's Nextcloud for starters. The UX is clunky. They feel a 30 day web app session expiry is perfectly fine.
I've gone back to FastMail for the time being
I think what I really want is:
- FastMail or similar for sending, and receiving new emails
- An email archive system that syncs from my main email provider, deleting from the remote anything over eg 4 weeks old
I like hosted providers for their IP reputation, spam systems, deliverability etc (and in the case of FM, the excellent web UI) but I don't like them having 15 years of my email which they can read whenever they wish. (edit: yes, I realise they could just keep copies)
Does anyone else have this kind of set up? Any recommendations to remove the pain of having a mailbox split into 2?
Foolish blunder
"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."
Frankly many in the US are over the Trump administration and I expect a massive backlash in the midterms. Do what you want of course but I think the descent of the US is slowing and there will be a return to normalcy after this admin.
Promise?
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.
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.
I've used https://migadu.com/ before. Not EU, but EEA (Switzerland).
ProtonMail? Not strictly speaking EU, but atleast EEA
It also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc
I like privacy, but a service that's focused on maximum possible privacy for its users paints a target on its back for any three-letter agency, as it will attract a large contingent of unsavoury people.
I just onboarded and was dumbfounded that they do not allow for proper calendar exposure other than a fully public link! The claim of zero knowledge is super cute, for those that need it, but I need a provider which allows me to integrate the calendar elsewhere, as those will not magically move into Proton. I guess I am not in their target market.
https://tuta.com/ and Protonmail
https://mailbox.org/
German e-mail service
Seconding this - reasonable pricing and I haven't had any issues at all with the service. I haven't used FastMail but most things I read suggest they are very similar in terms of what they offer so I would think Mailbox is a good EU alternative for someone who likes FastMail. (There are also other EU providers like Tuta but with slightly different trade-offs, ie, more emphasis on privacy but at the expense of IMAP/SMTP support.)
I switched to mailbox recently and I'm finding it quite good. I set it up with a custom domain, and that did require a bit of fuzting around, but the friction there was almost all on the side of my VPS hosting service, not Mailbox's fault.
I'm using Startmail, based in NL: https://www.startmail.com
I love fastmail, but I really wish they had servers close to me.
The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(
Where abouts are you located?
Smack center of Europe (southern Germany) Got >100ms pings.
https://mailcow.email/vps/
Not sure why I got downvoted for saying none of the dozen alternatives people have suggested are anything close to Fastmail. I guess none of you have even tried Fastmail. I am a big fan of its UI, and they have recently released and official Linux client.
There are reasons other than privacy to move to non-US companies: e.g. not wanting contribute to the US economy and the further expansion of US tech companies. This is my main motivation in fact.
So criticisms about these kind of posts and initiatives along the lines of "EU privacy bad too" are insufficient and are unpersuasive.
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.
The EU has far worse freedom of speech laws than the US, most websites would be insane to migrate to the EU.
The people who publicize this kind of stuff are not the sort to ruffle major feathers.
I wonder what kind of freedom of speech you would require.
There's many a way to ruffle feathers eh?
Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.
Yeah, and ARM is based outside of EU, just across La Manche and Irish Sea.
One: ARM has been softbank for a good while now. And softband is japanese. Two: ARM ISA is heavily IP locked.
For the moment, would be much more appropriate to design performant implementations (mobile/server/desktop) on RISC-V ISA.
yeah the blog is about software, not hardware
software runs on hardware.
hello
And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.
That ship had sailed long ago.
European here.
"Migrating to the EU" is serving a self-fulfilling delusion just as joining the so -called revolutionary forces after WW2 and moving to eastern Europe.
The EU does everything to de-industrialize itself and protect its ground by using surveillance tools branded as "child protection" rules.
Europeans don't have any tradition in thinking in freedom, in civil rights, in having a state that isn't there to spoil you, but grant basic service to allow you to shape your life the way you want it. Instead, Europeans hunger for "the state", thrive under more and more "protection rules" and supervision over the economy.
Anything and everything that requires financial and economic freedom is deemed suspicious and under the disguise of equality needs to be taxed into the ground.
Almost no one takes offense by the fact that the predominant topics in the EU center around perceived life-style threads all caused by one person thousands of miles away while wondering that the quality of life and public service going down the hill and every still existing local newspaper looks like an international outlet like New York Times: local topics don't exist. Anything and everything has to be linked to something that can be linked to "the fight against XYZ" not simply pragmatism or anything rational.
In Germany there is a former major party imploding in record time, having absolutely no representation anymore. And what these radicals do, is building a self-serving kraken, that checks off any and every checkmark of an totalitarian playbook.
And this shall be the basis for making my future depend an services having to exist within these given circumstances?
The genius thing about US constitution is the inherit limitation of terms. You see exactly the opposite in anything and everything in the EU and Germany. 14 or 16+ years of being in control means there was never any need to readjust.
I am more than happy and willing to move everything out of the EU.
Given the fact that europeans think, that a "Hosted in the EU" service is 100% European (whatever the term means) is some sort of discriminatory - something that is dealing with the double standard rampant in the EU.
BTW, I am still waiting for full autonomy: nothing from Github or any open source project that traces back to Github was used in this service.
European arrogance is so disgusting. Instead of simply changing the tune and accepting the fact, that different circumstances lead to different results, there is some sort of ego distorting the decision making process.
How much more evidence is needed, that the EU is lost compared to services done in the US? And you should look at the whole picture, instead of using your gut to draw conclusions.
I admire and acknowledge anything and everything that has been achieved in the US in regards to Computer Science.
I will never ever migrate to the EU. Never.
Linus Torvalds is Finnish.
Guido Van Rossum is Dutch.
Anders Hejlsberg is Danish.
Bjarne Stroustroup is Danish (I think?).
Rasmus Lersdorf is Danish.
Bram Molenaar was Dutch.
Edgar Dijkstra was Dutch.
Niklaus Wirth was Swiss.
Andrei Alexandrescu is Romanian.
I can probably think of many others.
The US is good at inventing things but it's amazing at marketing them and making money and drawing others to do the inventing for them.
> European here. > in Germany....
We're not all Germany over here.
Another daily thread on this topic. Interesting. What makes this one unique and not exactly like every other one?
"This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account."
Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
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.
I guess when the alternative is Trump's vision of the future ... - at least I know what I would choose.
I agree, and moved to the EU from the US for related reasons, but Von der Leyen's entire strategy for handling Trump seems to be immediate capitulation to horrendously one-sided deals, which doesn't give a lot of confidence.
Trump will be gone in 2028 and policies may radically change depending on who replaces him. There is no change on the horizon in the EU when Von Der Leyen is replaced (she is just the current public face of the blob...)
Do you believe this ? Even if the Americans get out of their zombie existence and get out to vote (on another candidate), I cannot imagine Trump will accept an election loss. (A reminder: The US has had a 24% drop in the Liberal Democracy Index score in just one year and your supreme court is owned)
Von der Leyen has made it clear the values of the EU are exactly the same as those of the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEbQoT3Xlho
That video is from 11 months ago, long before Trump was elected for his second term. Once was an anomaly. Twice is nearly a pattern but not an anomaly. Third time is an established pattern.
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.
You have no idea what you are talking about, really. We don’t "frequently" pass such laws. Nobody is accessing private messages, even if there have been such attempts.
The EU has still the strongest privacy laws world wide, and in contrast to others a strong ethical foundation. It may be slow, it may be torn, it may be overly beaurocratic, but sure enough not authoritarian.
France is routinely criticised for its police, justice system, and rule of law [1]. In general only the French believe that they are a shining beacon.
[1] https://worldjusticeproject.org/rule-of-law-index/country/Fr...
I don't think the french as a whole believe that. A lot of people in France are highly critical of the way the current government (and how it is more and more far right leaning) has been handling things in the last decade. There is a big issue of the police forces syndicates being highly far right biased which doesn't help.
Like many countries, it is not homogeneous.
None of the issues highlighted are because of the last decade of any alleged "far right leaning". In fact things have probably improved compared to a few decades ago.
Two words: chat control
https://www.brusselstimes.com/eu-affairs/2030171/end-of-chat...
Defeated! (At least for now...)
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.
Assuming your assessment is correct, how do you think this will affect the digital sector?
Capital flows to where it enjoys the greatest returns. That is not Europe, not now nor in any foreseeable future. There is no reason for a skilled professional interested in making money to go there.
I don't think that this was the intention of the original blog post. It's about _digital_ migration for tech savvy folks who want to decouple from us-based tech monopolists.
You know, making money is not everything. Why should I be rich in a third-world country (the US).