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.
There are words and concepts that cut reality at the seams, and others that feel good and make you dumb as rocks. Virtue signaling came out the gate strong but has fallen solidly i to the second camp.
If we stay on the current path, in a few months tech will start to feel the pain of Trump's rampage. The only redeemable thing about that is that maybe tech workers and Americans generally will finally stop feeling like they're above it all.
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.
All of this anti-US sentiment has caused me to flip as well. I thought we were all pals, oops we had a populist demagogue who was promoted by russia win an election and now you dont want to be friends.
Im happy to stop the freebies we give other nations.
> 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 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:
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
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.
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?
>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
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
> 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)
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?".
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).
Is it not true that when entering the US you are required to show all your social media content on request, and if there is anything negative about the current administration, you can be denied entry (if you are lucky, and not detained for an indefinite amount of time)?
Truly exceptional indeed. You are basically on par with China.
The EU is really more middle-of-the-road in most things, while the US tends to be more extreme: more really good ideas, but also more really bad ideas. But that is also the result of the EU being largely controlled by bureaucrats and compliance officers instead of real leaders.
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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'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 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…
> 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
> 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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
That’s a whole lot of trouble just to virtue signal, mate, and in the end you aren’t even getting the result you want.
I see it as an effort to divest themselves of moral inequity.
And the result isn't the point: the effort and the reason for the effort, is.
This is the first iteration/calibration of a more conscientious intention.
When moral imperative is an unidentifiable road feature on the highway towards wherever the US is going...small efforts matter
how is that not virtue signalling lol
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.
Im happy to stop the freebies we give other nations.
Maybe try Immich?
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?
https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...
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 :)
I looked into this, there are lots of people in forums discussing/ asking for EU based servers.
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.
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?
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.
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
Even then, there's no interesting conversation to be had unless we pretend it does.
What?
A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.
We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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?
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.
I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.
By the way, sex him off? Trying to decipher the number of characters
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.
(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.
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)
That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...
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.
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...
https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...
Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.
An LLM can probably find some better links though.
I'll repeat: EIO
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.
> 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...
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?
On a national level, sure.
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.
Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.
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.
I agree with you that both of those laws are stupid, but that's a completely separate discussion to what I'm claiming above.
https://rsf.org/en/index
American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.
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?".
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
Truly exceptional indeed. You are basically on par with China.
https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...
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.
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)
> - 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.
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.
Also, what you're describing is still infinitely better than the European system! The cops get to issue the warrants themselves.
What you are claiming about European cops is also not uniformly true. A German police officer cannot "just" self-issue a search warrant.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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://allquiet.app
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
[1]: https://ecosia.org
[2]: https://qwant.com
[3]: https://uruky.com
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.
and ofc, non-CN too
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.
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/
The Queen died of 8th September 2022.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://forgejo.org
[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...
[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues
https://gitolite.com/gitolite/
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.
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.
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?
But their limit seems around 100 MB storage-usage, so I guess it's within their abilities to tolerate some glitches.
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 can pull, but having the back and forth documented along with the code is not a nice to have imho
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
Your git repository will be instantly accessible via https://example.com/repo.git.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)
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'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?
it won't even slow down actual criminal investigations by nation states and might not even stop a determined civil suit.
No need to share my cc with yet another company.
- 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.
Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.
Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either
https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...
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).
– 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.
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 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.
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 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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
No it also encourages the local market and healthy competition. This way in the future we don't fall into the same enshittification trap.
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.
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.
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.
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.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.
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
German e-mail service
The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(
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.
Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.
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.