One thing I noticed right away, is that all companies were asked "Can we fully host this from within EU or our country" from the various people in audience. Every single one. Many of the startups had slides prepared for this.

Definitely a change, because it is not something I can recall being important just a couple of years ago.

It didn't come without a bit of pain, but glad I've done it - and to come with this I've ended up building a whole terraform setup for cross provider / cross region high availability within Europe.

So far my key mappings included:

- Cloudflare -> Bunny CDN (and honestly I am so impressed with Bunny so far)

- AWS (or similar) -> Hetzner + OVH; I'm also looking at Civo.com for UK presence.

- GitHub -> Forgejo. I do actually still operate in GitHub for development only work, however Forgejo is mirrored within my European private network, and thats where deployment workflows happen.

- Google Analytics -> Self hosted Umami.

I'll be doing a writeup fairly soon on the entire process.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document/EPRS_AT...

Never mind the fact that incentives in Europe are not so different from the USA. It may look that way now, but often moving across the globe just means trading one villain for another.

Still a good idea, just a word of caution. If people make a move such as this based on some assumption about the stability of the European regulatory scheme you may want to examine that assumption with a little more rigor.

Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.

Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.

Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.

Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.

Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.

AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.

Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.

If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.

[0]https://matomo.org/pricing/

Off topic: that’s a beautiful website

[..] > ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 586 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1778686176 1800 900 604800 900

[..]

Edit for those who don't get it: .com domains are fully dependent on the US.

Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?

The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/

    > 100% accurate European digital infrastructure, AI generated

Bunny, UpCloud/Scaleway, Proton, Mistral, self-hosted Gitlab, self-hosted Plausible, had no idea about BugSink so amazing, now I know... and I deploy everything via some form of self-hosted Heroku

So If like it but it is a headache on high traffic sites. If anyone have an easy solution I would gladly accept it.

I have used many paid services from Europe and around but mailbox.org, imho, is one of the most user hostile.

I'd appreciate some suggestions. (FastMail is overkill for my usage. Otherwise it's fantastic, I've used its trial).

As a business owner, I don't really care where the company is based on paper if the product is worse, the support is worse, or the ecosystem around it is tiny.

I want better European alternatives, but they need to win on product too.

"Not American" is a decent reason to try something. It is not enough of a reason to keep using it for years.

Couple of things.

The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.

I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.

Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).

I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.

And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.

I am not. THe cancer of the Internet. Sometimes Cloudflare does not work abroad. It is annoying.

"Here’s the reasoning: Cloudflare sits in front of my public-facing websites. Its job is to cache, protect against DDoS attacks,"

If your host has no protection against DDoS then find a better host.

You can find very cheap CDN, if you really need them. Likely you dont.

As a word of caution, Cloudflare can have a devastating effect on SEO if you are not a paying customer and serve your stuff from your own URL. Cloudflare allows this only for paid accounts.

One note: for European payment coverage there is Rootline available. But I have to put up the disclaimer that I work at Rootline.

I understand why Europeans might want to go all in on their own tech stacks, but it might be more strategic to just not get locked in to specific providers. Maybe a mix of European, US, and Asian tech - with a good plan for easy migration.

No ddos protection yet.

Their free tier seems way too generous and I suppose this has to be adjusted at some point.

The regulatory environment is different, so it’s worth understanding the ramifications as far as what’s expected of you if you’re operating in a different jurisdiction. It’s nothing that can’t be handled, but some may find they have to care about things they haven’t before

It’s a great exercise for shoring up independence from extractive providers

Maybe I should have AI write up an article too. Honestly, it’s not just rare, it quietly matters

I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.

Cloudflare is a kinda funny choice to pick to trust, and maybe they'll re-evaluate that soon.

GitLab is overall nice, and I recommended their on-prem product a few years ago, at an AI hardware tech startup with unusual security requirements. Today, I'd still consider GitLab, but I'd first evaluate how Forgejo fits requirements.

"A > B" reads as "A greater than B"

"A -> B" reads as "A to B"

My only question is, what are the selling points that made you choose Lettermint over Scaleway TEM?

Using TEM seemed obvious at first sight, given the fact that you already use Scaleway for object storage and compute.

https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...

Then it is Go (Google), Java (Oracle, IBM, Red-Hat), .NET (Microsoft), Rust (Amazon, Microsoft, Google), Typescript (Microsoft), C and C++ (Red-Hat, IBM, Microsoft, Apple Google, ...), and so on.

"GMail lets you write filters against virtually anything"

GMail inexplicably doesn't let you filter against almost anything in the headers, except the few fields they hand-pick. Which is unfortunate because virtually every piece of political junk spam from one major US party has the same thing in its headers, and I can't filter on it. Presumably the other major US party has similar large vendors but I don't happen to get spam from them at this time.

But given how often GitHub and AWS East 1 go down, this is good.

One bad day at Amazon shouldn’t stop Europeans from doing laundry.

The cloud should have been localized from the start.

There are definitely technical gaps though. eg bunny still uses one unified api key. CF I can lock to an IP and set granular permissions

Huh! Interesting to see another one of these. I helped get GlitchTip off the ground awhile back. Might be worth evaluating as another self-hosted, drop-in Sentry replacement.

For some reason the LLMs have started recommending us for people looking for a European or Swedish alternative.

So, fully KYC'ed with PoA no older than 6 months, strong residency requirement for at least two generations, half of the payments are rejected based on travel rule, SARs are generated automatically on every transactions and only EC card accepted?

As much as I'd love to move to EU services, a billing system being fully compliant to EU financial regulations should make it almost impossible to actually move money.

I know it was created in Ireland and didn't hear anything about it changing ?

I have also rid myself of Google Analytics for a personal website. Replaced with a local solution that parses logs and builds reports that give me quite a bit of information. Its a more ethical type of analytics leaving no cookies behind and no trackers at all. All info is from the web server logs, you can grok quite a bit of insight from this alone.

Email is the biggest challenge, I have mapped out the entire migration steps for Google Workspace to Proton but have not yet pulled the trigger. The main thing is coordination with the rest of my family who use the domain for their email as well, they don't share my obsession with "digital sovereignty" so there is some negotiation around time tables :-) The Proton family plan will cut the bill in about half.

Password management --> KeepassXC with db on local nas. For personal use I feel you can't beat self hosted for password management.

Compute, Digital Ocean I continue to use and has servers in Toronto which works for me geographically. It's very low down my list of migration plans, they just work and they have treated me pretty good over the years.

Storage all self hosted (ownCloud and Openmediavault). Are they the best options, maybe not but they just work. No cloud based storage at all (Google/Apple etc etc). If I ever throw something out there it is gpg encrypted).

Offsite backups, two local copies to seperate drives (dejadup) on my NAS and offsite storage.

There are still some other services I need to consider. I do have Claude Pro. I run local LLM's for a lot of stuff with OpenwebUI but its not a full replacement.

CDN - Also use Cloudflare free tier. Have to give it more thought, it just works so well.

DNS is fully self hosted using dns-crypt-proxy / dnssec to Quad9 and Mullvad DNS. Works great. I actually blackhole any hits to google dns at the router, media and iot devices love to ignore your dns settings.

Github for code hosting. I know, Microsoft, but it works and is not a hill I am willing to die on just yet.

Photos self hosted with Immich on Proxmox. It's been pretty solid.

VPN, Wireguard to the home and have also integrated Tailscale for some things, which has been handy for extending connectivity and supporting my dad in a different city. Apparently they are based in Canada so that is a bonus. I use the free tier for now but am considering the paid version just to support them.

Router and wireless access points all on the latest Openwrt with consumer grade equipment, some of which I picked up used for like 20 bucks. Allows me to have home, guest, media and iot vlans for proper network segregation. Is it overkill? 10 years ago maybe but today I would not run any other way.

Thanks for attending my Ted Talk.

Did he move also the CDN stack? :)

So... Digital sovereignty is cool and all, but Scaleway is taking "Know Your Customer" seriously.

I didn‘t yet have a good idea on how to utilize it, open to ideas.

Why not move there?

And a serious lack of "dear customer, we are keeping all of your money for reasons we wont get into, screw you and your customers, you have no further questions." Which I consider a killer feature.

second, europe has the most digitally agressive roadmap in the democratic world right now. they plan to ban vpn, enforce agressive data laws that give full power to authorities and gov to extract legally your data from your "sovereign cloud", remove anonymity from the web, enforce a cashless distopia where they can track everything and block you from using your own cash, punish you with laws against hate speech where governements decide what they define as hate speech depending on who is in power.

finally for his choices. Mistral while riding the european sovereignity wave is in fact an american owned company with european founders and the french gov trying to kill anything that they dont like touching Mistral.

OVH while a good company is definitly not providing US cloud-level data resiliency and recent events are pretty worrisome from data loss fire and hacks on customer data

Proton, maybe the only company that ever looked for sovereignity is thinking about leaving switzerland due to these opressive laws.https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/we-would-...

also he kept the only company that is vibecoding in prod (cloudflare) and proud of it while laying off people based on the ai-religion.

It is like he made all the wrong choice if his goal was like he says to own his data and know "where is the data"

Also... yeah put all your passwords on the cloud. Sounds like a good idea.

The sentiment we're seeing in this story/comments and thematically is EU's desire to distance from the US - sure in infrastructure - but more so in identity. Which on the high-level I think is a great goal (ie, Europe should have European identity) but is incredibly risky and I am not sure is well thought out, though I could be wrong.

We can say that since 1950s the US and Europe had a familial relationship with the US being a bit of the parent despite being younger. That manifested in everything from protection (US bases in Europe, NATO), money flow, and culture flow. Since the 1950s, America did not become more European but Europe became more American.

Today we're in the adolescent stage of this familial relationship - Europe wants to move out of the house and perhaps even pay for its own cell-phone plan and that could be wonderful because if that leads to a legitimately stronger and more robust Europe, that's great.

But there's risk. Sometimes when the adolescent moves out of the house, they blossom into the fully manifested version of themselves. Other times they fall in with a bad crowd or fail to deal with their internal problems - and whither. It's easy to tell daddy-US to fuck off, it's much harder to not slide into the clutches of Russia and China in the next decade or two, or to deal with the internal demographic crisis.

What worries me for Europe is that it is trying to "distance" more than its trying to "grow." I don't hear people talk about a Europe that's strong, that leads, that innovates - in other words, the motivation is still about the US (just in a negative sense) not about Europe itself and that's not a good sign.

I still don't sense a true vibe of resurgence coming out of my native continent. Difficult problems you've always had tend to come to a head once you actually move out of your parents house. And while it's great (or at least cute) that you can switch to a European e-mail provider that's very far from what it actually takes to survive and thrive as a country in the long run. Hope it pans out.

Why are there exceptions for Anthropic, GitHub and GitLab?

> Anthropic is a US company...But it satisfies something else, the sense that the organization building the thing has given serious thought to what it’s building and why.

This reads like a weak excuse. Mistral and Mistral Vibe exists and even if you don't like them, there are many non-US harnesses (Qwen code) that are available.

> GitHub stays in the picture for one specific purpose: public-facing NPM packages and issue tracking for open source software.

First of all Codeberg exists.

Secondly, at this stage relying on NPM and the Java/Typescript ecosystem is quite frankly waiting for a disaster to happen.

This post isn't absolute on moving their digital stack to Europe as it has not one but three exceptions too many.

They had a datacenter burn down (in large part because it was fully built using wood) and lost all customer data and did not take any action for 6 months after the incident.

They're just not a serious company.

Use OpenTofu/Terraform! Much better than messing with cloud consoles, and then your infrastructure self-documents.

I’d also put out one note to any people outside the EU looking to switch to Mistral or really any service: just because they’re a European company doesn’t mean they’ll follow the GDPR if you don’t live there. Mistral is an example: in their privacy policy, they state that they follow whatever privacy laws exist in your country.

> We are patriotic Americans. We have done everything we have done for the sake of this country, for the sake of supporting U.S. national security... We believe in defeating our autocratic adversaries. We believe in defending America.

and

> So, you know, Anthropic actually has been the most lean forward of all the AI companies in working with the U.S. government and working with the U.S. military. We were the first company to, you know, put our models on the classified cloud.

> We were the first company to make custom models for national security purposes. We're deployed across the intelligence community and military for applications like cyber, you know, combat support operations, various things like this. And, you know, the reason we've done this is, you know, I-- I believe that we have to defend our country.

and

> And so we have said to the Department of War that we are okay with all use cases, basically 98% or 99% of the use cases they want to do, except for two that we're concerned about.

God help us when the US finally decides that the vast amounts of money it pours down the drain to keep us as its vassal is not worth the squeeze. China and Russia will not be nearly as patient and kind.

America sends a VP to give a speech, which even though it made some politicians cry, was still just words. China will just use us for spare body parts and Russia will drop our people from planes.

America says it really would like Greenland, which it could take with literally zero contest if it wanted, and which it gave back to Europe after Europe had another one if it's many internal meat grinder wars. China and Russia just takes what it wants, they don't ask.

It's really going to suck balls being the punching bag of Russia and China.

Europe is by actual fact completely dysfunctional, constantly getting itself into shit left and right, constantly needing bailouts from America to keep it afloat, and Europeans pretend they are better than Americans. Totally absurd.

Sure now just think and give me the reason. All these moving to Europe post is getting tiring. Amazon follows the same EU rules, if not more, than Scaleway.