Migrating to the EU

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.

> 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?

> 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

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.

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.

https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.

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

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.

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

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.

Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.

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)

I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.

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.

One concern is that if an EU company becomes very successful, it could easily be acquired by a large U.S. corporation.

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).

> 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

For the longest time it was an economic axiom that regulations drive off businesses, and here stronger laws are directly attracting business!

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.

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.

> 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 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.

The EU has far worse freedom of speech laws than the US, most websites would be insane to migrate to the EU.

Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.

This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.

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’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.

Reminder: Hetzner/Linode were MITMing their client(jabber.ru) withour any legal basis and past prosecution: https://notes.valdikss.org.ru/jabber.ru-mitm/

Out of the pan into the fire

You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.

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.

"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."

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.

Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.

And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.

> 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...

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.

migrating to a re gion that votes laws to restrict freedom of speech, wants to remove anonymity from social network and can block your bank account for opinions that do not align with european stance on things like for instance mass migrations from third world countries. Yeah seems a smart move.

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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.

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.

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.