Given the recent events, I have been slowly migrating my internet presence to the EU and off the Big US Tech companies. As a secondary objective, I also wanted to get rid of subscriptions and have more control over my data. It has not been very hard, but it is a slow process given all the tools that have been experimenting with over the years.

So far:

• email: Fastmail: I have been using them for years, without knowing that they had a strong EU presence. One less thing to worry about.
• Travel blogs: from wordpress/blogger to Fastmail: Fastmail offer a small online drive that can be exposed via websites. They handle serving the files and TLS certificates. I had to import the original blogs into a local docker wordpress instance and generate the static files with staatic. It worked surprisingly well.
• DNS registrar: from AWS to Hetzner. Again, the process took a few days but was pretty smooth.
• DNS hosting: from AWS Route53 to Hetzner DNS console. It was pretty easy to set up, and there is an API that Caddy can use to request Acme certs.
• Main Backups: from IDrive to Hetzner Storage Boxes with BorgBackup. The constant price increases and lack of features meant that it was a no-brainer.
• Website backups: from AWS S3 Hetzner Storage Boxes. The storage boxes offer sub-accounts that have access to only part of the filesystem tree, and can be reached via SSH. Transitioning from aws s3 cp to scp was trivial. Access rights and user management is also much simpler.
• Text/Video chats: from Whatsapp to Signal and Telegram. My parents and family were keen to move away from Meta, so we decided to switch to Signal. Some of my European friends also wanted to be out but chose Telegram. I still need WhatsApp to communicate with club groups but I reduced my usage by 90%.
• Books store: from the Amazon Store to whoever sells books online with Adobe DRM. I got burned by the new encryption scheme that Amazon has rolled out and prevented me from migrating some books (fortunately very few).
• Books management: from the kindle app to Calibre, Calibre-web and DeDRM. It is less convenient, but I can still access all my ebooks without having to physically connect my ebook to the computer.
• Book reader: from Kindle to KOReader: that is a little gem. The source code is very easy to follow (thank you lua!) so I have been able to fix bugs myself, and even get them merged in days thanks to the very nice community there. I can now download my RSS feeds directly from the reader without a third-party service.
• Bookmarks-to-reader: from a custom project with Pocket to Wallbag. There is a Wallbag plugin in KoReader so I can just hit “Sync” and get all my bookmarks in the reader in no time as epubs.
• Music: from Spotify to a library managed by Beets with Navidrome as the server and Amperfy as the iOS media player.

More will be added as I go. I still have an oracle free account for my public web services and a couple of S3 buckets that I need to move, but I have the time. I will also try to move out of GitHub at some point. The most important was my ebook collection, as it was locked into the Amazon Ecosystem.

Moving out of the apple ecosystem for my phone and Google Photos/Youtube will be a lot more difficult, as I could not find any replacements that were good enough for now.

In the end I am pretty happy with the transition. It required quite a bit of work but I managed to reduce my dependency to big US cloud companies by a little, and even reduced the number of services and accounts I need to wory about.