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:
Updated 30.04.2025: more NAS usage, less OneDrive, external Backup/Snapshot
- Webhosting: I was lucky here. I was hosting all my online presence(es) in German data centers (under my own Domains) anyways since years – so nothing to change.
- Twitter: I left Twitter in about Spring 2023 and deleted all my content there.
- Facebook: I left Facebook quite a while ago, still have a dormant account but haven’t logged in since long.
- 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 publishing: 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
- OneDrive: Minimized usage. I moved my documents back to my NAS and have it available via VPN on my mobile, so: no features lost. Some files will sync between desktop(s) and mobile via OneDrive but that’s fine. Synchronizing documents from PCs to NAS is done via the NAS-Sync software.
- External Backup: stays on OneDrive but is encrypted before upload. (ALWAYS Test decryption!)
Partially Migrated or Decreased Usage:
- LinkedIn: deleted almost all content (using some great scripts) and might use it to link into my blog. I finally also created another Mastodon account to follow techy people who aren’t “thrilled to announce <something>” .
- Instagram: There are still a bunch of people I don’t want to lose touch with there – so I’m keeping it for now.
- WhatsApp: the final boss. It’s unlikely I’ll ever fully quit, but I switch to other messengers whenever possible.
Services that are open for possible migration (later):
These are services I’m still evaluating. I haven’t found the right alternative yet – or the effort just isn’t worth it (yet).
- Calendar: I was a bit surprised to find that some basic calendar solutions don’t even support inviting other people – and are often tightly linked to your email and contacts. As mentioned above, mailbox.org might be the way to go. But that would mean moving email – again.
- Delta Backups / Snapshots: don’t have a good solution yet. Hetzner Storage Box looks like worth further investigating.
- Github: some repos are linked on scientific papers. That shouldn’t break
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 being more intentional about the tools and platforms I use has made a big difference.
@blog thanks for sharing all this info! Sounds like you've made great progress already good luck
Thanks! Yeah it’s a bit of an effort. I’d recommend doing one after the other, otherwise it might really become a burden!
@blog for onedrive and calendar you could try Nextcloud. For the photos, you should definitely try Immich! For the web search, try https://startpage.com.
Thanks Andrea! As I just got aware of Synology trying to force users onto their HDDs in the near future your suggestions will be attractive. I guess I won’t rely too much on Synology Drive or Synology Photos but likely try to even get independent of those as well.
It’s a pity: I wanted to get independent of US cloud providers – but the first company that starts to behave weird is the NAS manufacturer (which MIGHT hit me just in the next 1-2 years – but still).
Heyo, oh thanks for the recommendation! I wasn’t aware of Hetzner StorageBox. I just don’t understand if it is paied by hour or fixed, (edit: ah it is “per hour”. and “usage” means: “I can use it”. That makes sense)
About SynologyDrive .. yeah – still thinking whether to buy more into synology (but it would be easy) vs going for nextcloud (more open but … even more to configure upfront :-/)
@blog As an old IT geek that started in this game long before the modern internet (I had an email address in the 1980s when all it could do was talk to UK or US universities or the military via JANET or DARPANET etc.over UUCP) I have been increasingly depressed at how big US tech has worked so hard at killing off the original,, open, standardised, federrated design principles of the web and sucking everyone into their closed silos.
Email is one of the original protocols in use and is still federated in theory but nearly everyone iis forced onto Google or Microsoft as there are few good alternatives.
I have hosted own email (plus calendar and contacts) for 25 years now. Not too tricky if you are IT savvy… but…
My stack (all open source):
Opensuse Linux
Postfix email server
MariaDB database
Dovecot IMAP server
Apache web server
Amavis anti-spam/anti-virus
Spamassasin spam filters
SOGo groupware
Plus good secure DNS with SPF, DKIM and DMARC records and reverse-ip for the server.
Give it a go!
#opensuse #linux #postfix #dovecot #mariadb #apache #sogo #selfhosting #email
@ianhodgepig @blog
> Not too tricky if you are IT savvy.
The real societal challenge of the present is how to lower that threshold by an order of magnitude (at least).
Meaning that if such "IT savvy persons" are available in 1:1000 proportions (and all work for bigtech) to engineer the stack so that a more impactful 1:100 can service it.
So that e.g., somebody can run such servers in a neighborhood, a village center, whatever.
It feels possible if people put their mind to it.
@openrisk @ianhodgepig @blog I’ve also read contradictory statements by other people who have been doing this for decades, and their take is that this is really time consuming because you’ll get randomly shut out from parts of the delivery network with no recourse
@GuillaumeRossolini @openrisk @blog If your mail transport (postfix in my case) and DNS, DKIM, SPF and DMARC are all setup properly in my experience everything works well and you don't get delivery issues. Friends who have hotmail/outlook addresses have far more issues in my experience since their M$ servers are regularly blacklisted due to volume of spam going through them.
@openrisk @blog I would say that it used to be the case that everyone got their email via their ISP so there were lots of different providers. ISPs all seem to have stopped offering email because nobody wants it any more as they are all on Gmail or Hotmail.
@ianhodgepig @blog yeah, that is a regular recurring thought of mine.
Somewhere between ISP's, NAS vendors and the rock solid open source stack lies a very natural decentralization architecture that needs no gatekeepers, certainly not the type who's business model is surveillance and manipulation.
Woah! Okay, that’s really quite something! You have my respect.
Email is a thing that I always delegated to my hosting provider but with my own domain. Just calendar is currently a kind of issue … It probably wouldn’t be. I’m currently just fed up with all the migration 🙁