If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m gradually moving away from “classical” Big Tech social media, focusing more on Mastodon and my own homepage.
On Mastodon, I came across Elena Rossini and followed her journey toward greater digital sovereignty. Inspired by her example, I decided to give up my YouTube channel in favor of a self-hosted PeerTube instance.
That, combined with a desire to make better use of my NAS and keep up with recent developments in the tech world, pushed me to seriously evaluate some European alternatives to the cloud services I’d been using.
Somewhere along the way, I also discovered the #UnplugTrump hashtag – a campaign (or movement?) calling for more digital independence. It encourages people to disconnect from platforms tied to Trump and Big Tech and instead opt for privacy-respecting alternatives.
The emphasis is on decentralization, open-source solutions, and European-based services – aiming to reduce reliance on (U.S.) tech giants. That didn’t sound too bad – so I decided to put my own setup to the test.
But enough talking – where do I stand now? Did I even need to change anything?
(I’m updating this list to keep track)
Services that I changed / migrated completely:
Update 04.2025: more NAS usage, less OneDrive, external Backup/Snapshot
Update 06.2025: Facebook deleted (again!), minimized Instagram and #LinkedIn
Update 07.2025: moved Code to Codeberg
Update 10.2025: my own FreshRss instance in favour of Feedly
Update 11.2025: NextCloud will stay. Calendar, Keepass, OneNote
- Webhosting: I was lucky here. I was hosting all my online presences in German data centers (under my own Domains) anyways since years – so nothing to change.
- Twitter: I left Twitter in early 2023 and deleted all my content there.
- Facebook: I left Facebook quite a while ago and deleted my account
- Pi-Hole: To reduce (Ad-)Tracking I had a Pi-Hole running for quite a while. I’m surprised by how many requests it blocks.)
- Delete Cookies: I always thought this would be annoying. But after accidentally clearing all my cookies, I gave the setting a shot – and it’s surprisingly smooth (see the blog post).
- Youtube: I abandoned my YouTube channel in favour of a selfhosted Peertube instance (see the blog post) and I am happy with it.
- Google Photos: As I am moving my photos into Lightroom and my NAS anyways, I deleted all photos and videos from Google Photos.
- Cloudflare DNS: I once praised Cloudflare’s malware-protecting DNS in a blog post. But after reading about their analytics practices, I realized: nothing is truly free. I’ve since switched to a European DNS resolver without analytics.
- GMail: This was by far the biggest pain to evaluate and migrate! I’ll probably write a separate blogpost about it. (TL;DR: I’d recommend mailbox.org, that would also solve my pending calendar issue).
- Contacts: also off GMail
- Strava: removed Garmin-to-Strava Sync and deleted Strava Account
- Search Engine: using Ecosia and Startpage.com
- LinkedIn: deleted all content and likes (using some great scripts). Completely stopped scrolling through it! I only use it occasionally to link into my blog. As a replacement I created a Mastodon account to follow tech topics.
- Bitbucket: Moved some archived code projects from Bitbucket to Codeberg
- Feedly: I was missing the feature to filter / auto-mark-as-read really desperately. So I installed FreshRss on my webhost together with capyReader on the phone.
- OneDrive: I now use a managed NextCloud via Hetzner. I’m impressed by the features! plus I get 1 TB storage for ~ 5€ / month. I use it for
- Offsite Backup
- Calendar
- Sharing Photos & Files with friends and family
- OneNote: Replaced with Joplin. Joplin has less features – but it looks okay to me.
- Syncing Keepass: Formerly done via OneDrive, now via WebDAV on my Synology NAS and VPN (it doesn’t work properly via Synology Drive)
- ChatGPT: I switched over to Mistral.ai for the chat and for API Usage in some private projects.
Partially Migrated or Decreased Usage:
- OneDrive: Minimized usage.
- Instagram: I have minimized posting content there, cleared the story archive. Only use it to stay in contact with a couple of people
- WhatsApp: I don’t text too much. The majority of people is on Whatsapp. Some (few!) have switched to Signal. And the main traffic goes through Threema. Yet I’m using Whatsapp-Status Messages.
Services that are open for possible migration (later – or never):
These are services I’m still evaluating. I haven’t found the right alternative yet – or the effort just isn’t worth it (yet).
- Microsoft TODO: Haven’t found a good alterntive yet – and it’s just TODOs.
- Github: some repos are linked on scientific papers, those URLs shouldn’t break.
- Lightroom: well … I don’t know about a real alternative that fits all my needs.
- Android: I don’t want to flash an alternative OS on it.
- Windows on Desktop: Linux never fit to me on the desktop when I tried it quite long time ago. Maybe it would nowadays. But it always cost me a huge amount of time and in the end I returned to Windows.
There are still some services and applications left. But the rest is either too cumbersome to change, I just don’t have an alternative with UX that works for me or I just don’t care. And honestly? I’m fine with that.
I don’t expect to fully unplug from everything. But to me it already made a big difference to be more intentional about the tools and platforms that I use.
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