I have decided that I want to move my digital assets and workflows away from services hosted in the USA. There are three reasons for this:
- The leadership of the United States of America has become so erratic and untrustworthy that the calculus of reliability has changed. They may reinforce their ill-thought-out trade wars and have their obsequious broligarchs deny services to other countries, or their political malpractice might lead to other situations where I can no longer trust services located outside Europe to maintain user privacy.
- As a European, I simply want to vote with my wallet in support of the big lifts we have to make, and send an infinitesimally small signal to the Americans that they are not doing themselves any favours.
- It is also an interesting hobby project, both from a technical and a planning and management standpoint. Possibly the only subject rivaling AI for attention in the Norwegian tech press and Linkedin-osphere these days is digital resilience and homeshoring. Doing it for myself will give me some insight into the challenges it entails.
So, what’s with the name? I enjoy naming my projects, and the The Voyage of Dawn Treader is a story about sailing east across a great sea, much like I plan on having my data do. It’s also a children’s fantasy book, which some people might consider this project to be.
Any good IT project starts with a discovery phase; what are our requirements and priorities? My main requirement is to replicate today’s functionality as close as possible, and have it hosted in the EEA. The secondary requirement is to keep the price reasonably low, even though I will have to accept increased costs compared to what I have now. Consolidating on as few providers as possible in order to reduce administration and, presumably, costs is a tertiary concern.
I have no issue using Open Source software originating in the USA, since by its nature we can always fix things ourselves if push comes to shove.
Scott Hanselman wrote that it is important to own your words, that is to own your own domain – and I find that to be true. If my email was a regular gMail and my homepage was only on a social network, migrating everything would have been much more of a hassle. (But it will still be something of a hassle!) Here is the list of services I have identified:
| Requirement | Current solution | Notes |
| Google Workspace | Grandfathered plan for Workspace from when it was free for “small businesses” | |
| Website | NearlyFreeSpeech.net | Pay-for-what-you-use web hosting, very cheap and good |
| Domain registrar + DNS | NearlyFreeSpeech.net | |
| Online Drive | Google Drive (Google Workspace) | |
| Automatic backup of photos from phone | Google Photos (Google Workspace) | |
| Calendar | Google Workspace | Needs to be shareable |
| Notes | Google Keep | Prefer to be shareable |
| Search Engine | DuckDuckGo | A recent change |
| Operating System | Windows 10 | Was going to go back to full-time Linux anyway since my PC doesn’t support Windows 11 |
| Entertainment | Amazon Prime video, Netflix, Youtube | Thank goodness Spotify is Swedish |
| Social Networks | Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, X-Twitter (long dormant) | Cancelling X is easy, Facebook and LinkedIn may be too hard |
Will I be able to migrate away from all of these and abstain from using those services that I can’t find a suitable replacement for? Quite possibly not! But I am focusing on services that I pay for with money directly, and on all services connected to my domain, email and personal files. Time to peruse
european-alternatives.eu – the first migration will be this website.
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