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> Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how h

• Skinney 2y ago
  > Git repos (it's too difficult) Sourcehut > Startpage uses Google's index. If they have enough users/make enough money, they'll make their own. Ecosia and Qwant (both european search engines) are working together to make their own index. In any case, even if a european is a proxy for an american service, you need to prove that there is a market for an european equivalent for change to happen.
  • arthurmorgan 2y ago
    TIL that Sourcehut is or has been moving to the EU/Netherlands, thanks!
    • bayindirh 2y ago
      They have moved to Netherlands. They were planning, but Murphy knocked (kicked?) on the door as a massive DDOS, so they expedited the move, a lot.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • palotasb 2y ago
    > Sourcehut Is it there yet? > Notice: sr.ht is currently in alpha, and the quality of the service may reflect that. As such, payment is currently optional for most features, and only encouraged for users who want to support the ongoing development of the site. For a summary of the guarantees and limitations that the alpha entails, see this reference. – https://sourcehut.org/pricing https://sourcehut.org/pricing
    • myaccountonhn 2y ago
      I've used it for a few years and it's been stable and without issue. builds.sr.ht is the best CI that I've ever used. I think the only time it has been down has been due to DDOS. Would I run the git server of a multi-national bank on it? Probably not. A standard SAAS? Yeah if my team felt it was important to use EU companies. Otherwise you could also self-host with a VM, then you can use gitea or gitolite with systemd oneshot services.
  • soygem 2y ago
    [dead]
  • Sebb767 2y ago
    > If they have enough users/make enough money, they'll make their own. Ecosia and Qwant (both european search engines) are working together to make their own index. "There might be an option in the future if there are sufficient users" is a quite different milestone compared to fully switching away from US-based services.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • benhurmarcel 2y ago
    For git there's also Codeberg https://codeberg.org/ https://codeberg.org/
    • xcircle 2y ago
      +1 for Codeberg. I switched also to them. Theo habe also an alternative for GitHub Pages
• pzo 2y ago
  he mentioned also Quad9 - Cloudflare DNS replacement. I didn't know about and will probably switch to it. My other picks: SEARCH: qwant (france) LLM: mistral (france), librechat.ai, openwebui VPN: mullvad (sweden), protonVPN (swiss) AUTH: OpenID (sadly seems like not many sevices implement it) CLOUD: Hetzner (germany), OVHCloud (france) MAPS: here wego, openstreetmap EMAIL: protonMail (swiss), fastmail (australia) DNS: mullvad (sweden), quand9 (swiss), nextDNS TRANSLATE: DeepL (germany) BROWSER: zen-browser, vivaldi (norway) SOCIAL: nostr, mastadon (germany) IM: elements (uk), matrix (uk) EDIT: correction that fastmail is australian
  • hampus 2y ago
    Fastmail is based in Australia [1], not Germany. [1]: https://www.fastmail.com/company/about/ https://www.fastmail.com/company/about/
    • hnbad 2y ago
      Fastmail's servers are apparently located in the United States[1] - and the Netherlands, but there doesn't seem to be a way to know in which country your specific mailboxes are stored. > Our colocation providers could be compelled to give physical access to our servers. Network capturing devices could be installed. And in the worst case an attacker could simply force their way into the datacentre and physically remove our servers. So as far as warrantless surveillance is concerned, Fastmail is no better than if it were a US company or subsidiary thereof. They may themselves not be in a position where they would have to comply with US requests that would be illegal in Australia but whoever is operating their US-based DC absolutely is and they admit as much, even if they handwave this scenario as being no different from an ordinary hacking attempt[2]. [1]: https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you/ https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-u... [2]: Of course the flaw in this comparison is that an ordinary hacker can't make on-site staff comply with their demands and prohibit them from disclosing the hack. To do so without the authority of the law, you'd need a Hollywood action movie level of criminal enterprise that would usually involve taking a retired police officer's granddaughter hostage for some reason.
• MartijnHols 2y ago
  I expected it to be much harder to move away from these services I heavily relied on like Microsoft 365. Before I started migrating it figured I was so entangled in their web, that switching to an alternative would be a tremendous task. After actually migrating these services, I managed to migrate 90% within a few hours per service. This is nowhere near the amount of effort I expected it needed. Because of that, I'm also optimistic about migrating Git and NPM. While I don't think NPM will be any different, I suppose my optimism about Git might be misguided because of the amount of customization that goes into setting up CI/CD. Still, since only one out of all of the services might be hard - one that doesn't handle any PII - I stand by saying the overall effort was easier than expected.
  • kriops 2y ago
    Git has full name and email in all commits, fyi.
• Lutger 2y ago
  That is only the case if you think of migrating as an all-or-nothing. The services that he did manage to migrate went quite smoothly. If he would get stuck with one or two services, was it still worth it to migrate the ones he did manage? If you think it has all been in vain, then yes - its a different takeaway. But obviously Martijn does things step by step and I imagine he is happy even with the progress he made. In other words, the question is 'is it easy to migrate to a service for which decent alternatives exist', rather than 'do decent alternatives exist for every service you depend on?' You takeaway depends on what question you are most concerned with.
• mhitza 2y ago
  > It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they? Big plays are possible only with big capital, and that isn't what happens in the EU tech market. Lack of serious VCs is a problem on one hand, but to blame is also the EU Horizon program which will favor large established companies (which innovate very little), and the fact that the funding direction changes with hype cycles (in 2020 that was digital transformation, in 2024 it was AI and similar).
  • 0x073 2y ago
    VC is almost every time grow and sell (to us). So i think lack of vc can be good.
• thinkindie 2y ago
  I second that. Plus, there was no business critical workloads migration in place.
• blitzar 2y ago
  The "easy" stuff was easy as the external face is a custom domain. This should be understood as a lesson for future choices. Generic / not heavily propriety services which are pointed to by something you own (i.e. a domain name) can be migrated to new services. Web hosting, s3 hosting, email hosting etc. Migrating from @gmail is not possible without scrapping an identity and starting over.
• jll29 2y ago
  Not to mention that Proton relies exclusively on US-based companies for payment management (Strip, PayPal, ...). Transitive dependencies are always a worse problem than direct dependencies, because they are out of your view and control. But good thinking to get started with moving towards more autarky.
• m000 2y ago
  > It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they? Or for the EC to stop their "rearm" BS, and actually do something useful for the people by helping such companies. This is the real battleground for European independence and freedom.
  • owenthejumper 2y ago
    No it is not. Proton mail won't stop Putin from knocking on the next door after Ukraine.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    The US demanded rearmament for years, and the combination of US and Russia has now forced Europe - including previous neutrals Sweden and Finland - into rearmament. Only a proper, just, end to the war in Ukraine can remove the need for it now.
• addicted 2y ago
  > > Wrapping up - Migrating away from US cloud services was easier than I expected. > This is absolutely not the main takeaway and I find it difficult to see how he could write this He explains why he writes this, but this is an incredibly silly complaint because you can’t know what his expectations were. > The only meaningful switch he mentions is Proton, but as other comments have pointed out they have vendor lock-in problems. Which the author had with Microsoft 365 as well. Considering reducing vendor lock in wasn’t a goal of what they were trying to do, it’s not clear why you’re even raising that point. > The real takeaway from this is that it's currently impossible in any meaningful sense. It’s not clear how you got to this conclusion in any way whatsoever. In fact, this is an entirely ridiculous assertion. Essentially your entire comment is “the author didn’t aim to do what I wanted them to aim to do therefore the author is wrong”.
• egorfine 2y ago
  > European companies to step up ... and drown in regulations and taxes. There's a reason why the vast, vast majority of IT startups are not in the EU. Source: am a startup in the EU.
  • pjc50 2y ago
    There shouldn't, in theory, be a heavier regulatory or tax burden on an EU company operating in Europe than on a US multinational operating in Europe. There is in practice, which is how we got into this situation.
  • lousken 2y ago
    As far as i know, most of the actual tough regulation is focused towards larger businesses with enough revenue, not startups
• rigdzin 2y ago
  "there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up" and what would be business model? From tiny fraction of people that care about this - wast majority are also the same types, that are known to be unwilling to pay for any service ever even 1 cent.
  • benrutter 2y ago
    I'm not sure that's true - mainly because of some potentially big European customers in government or national infrastructure. They care enough about security and reliability, that they'd very likely choose a European provider over a US one, especially if the existing political climate continues. Companies don't need anywhere near the profits of Google to cover continuous development and maintenance, so while a European tech giant of the size of Google might not seem that likely, a European office suite certainly is more likely.
    • mike_hearn 2y ago
      Bert Hubert has previously written about how the entire European telecoms industry with the exception of Britain has outsourced not only equipment but also network operations to Huawei: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/ European national infrastructure providers don't care.
      • SSLy 2y ago
        I work in this, not everyone is so deep in cahoots with Huawei.
• microtonal 2y ago
  I agree that some of the hard parts were glanced over. Besides that, everyone seems to talk about the cloud and nobody about the other big, if not bigger, dependency. Our use of Windows and macOS (and Google Android and iOS if you will) on the vast majority of client devices. If Time and time again, data-sharing agreements between the EU and the US get busted, showing there's just no legal compatibility between EU privacy rights and US spying laws. [...] With the current political situation in the US, it's also starting to become clear that our entire digital infrastructure is at the mercy of US policies. It is no longer safe to rely on US clouds for our governments and societies, as the US government can shut it down at will. are your worries, rolling out government-required backdoors, lockouts, etc. in operating systems is going to be a huge issue. To shut down a large portion of Europe's infrastructure, the US government only has to order three companies to do so.
  • margorczynski 2y ago
    I think there were (and are) attempts of replacing at least the desktop systems with some variant of Linux but I think the dependency on Office remains the main problem in doing so - Windows lets you integrate all that pretty seamlessly with how the system works and is administered. China is probably much more aggressive in this than Europe as for them the US has been a rival (or even enemy) for a long time.
• danmaz74 2y ago
  > It feels like there's a real opportunity here for European companies to step up and make a big play, but will they? I think that this will depend a lot on expectations about politics in the USA in the medium/long term. Making this kind of investments makes sense if you expect the aggressive hostility that the current administration brought against Europe (and all other US traditional allies) to continue for a long time, and not just a couple years.
• magicmicah85 2y ago
  Qwant is an EU search engine, NPM allows you to specify a git repo and that git repo can be hosted on a gitlab instance or an EU provider. It’s not impossible to switch these providers, you just give up on major conveniences.