The Great Untangling part two: My Journey Away from US Tech Services

This is part two of my series: “The Great Untangling”, the series in which I document my journey away from US tech. In the first post, I listed my most pressing reasons why you should switch away from US tech. In this post, I write about my journey so far. I have been working on untangling my ~~digital~~ life from US companies and invested quite some time. I hope publishing about my journey will help you make the switch more easily.

My trust in the US throughout my entire life until now has led me to use countless US services, from Gmail, to iCloud, to Dropbox, and many more. With GDPR in 2018, I was forced to reevaluate a lot of my digital habits for work, and in 2024, with Trump’s reelection, it became clear I’d have to make getting rid of US services a priority.

My untangling journey, and what you can learn from it

The most valuable tool I found is European alternatives. If you’re looking for a replacement for a specific service, you can just type what you want to replace into the search-field, and it’ll show you alternatives from Europe.

I started out by deleting unused accounts and apps. That’s just good practice, as those tend to get hacked eventually. Afterwards, I put the leftover apps and services in a list, prioritised them, and replaced them one by one over time.

Social Media

After over a decade on Twitter, I left the platform in 2022. I “dipped my toes” into Threads, but its algorithm is designed to fuel outrage, so I left it only months after joining—twice.

I mainly use Mastodon, where I am part of the Indieweb.social server. It was recently migrated to UK-based management, making switching to another server unnecessary.

I have an Instagram account, but I don’t use it. Should I decide to post photos online again, I’ll do that on PixelFed and only post “What you missed”-reminders to Instagram, linking to PixelFed.

My BlueSky account is only for visibility. I post links to my stuff on it using Croissant,.

All that already made it a lot easier to move away from US social media. I’m glad I never went through with my intention to upload videos to YouTube. Should I decide to make videos, I’d probably upload them to a PeerTube server and post trailers/teasers on YouTube to promote them.

As a viewer, I replaced my subscriptions on the YouTube website itself with a feed reader. Did you know it’s possible to subscribe to YouTube channels via RSS? Instead of YouTube not showing me the videos from channels I subscribed to, I now see those videos in my favourite app: Reeder Classic.

Messengers

Before Tim Cook donated to Trump’s inaugural committee, 99% of my chats were on iMessage and the rest on WhatsApp. I added Threema and Signal to my portfolio of chat-apps, and encouraged everyone to use Threema instead of iMessage. Although Signal is a US-based nonprofit, I am available there because its UX is a lot better than Threema’s, and I’d rather people used Signal than iMessage to send me things.

Now the people important to me, have my Threema ID and mostly message me there. I barely use iMessage any more, and WhatsApp lies practically dormant.

GitHub

I use GIT for every software project, no matter the complexity or size. Between November ’24 and January ’25 I spent several weekends searching for alternatives and then moving everything off GitHub. I’ll keep my account so I can participate in other people’s projects.

I looked at a few alternatives to GitHub, and if I were still looking today, I’d probably go with Codeberg, “a democratic non-profit organisation”.¹

When I made the switch, I simply set up a GIT server on my NAS at home. I am still in the process of moving issues to my Notion replacement: Anytype.

Notion

Replacing Notion had been on my to-do list for some time before the US elected a malicious clown, but I just couldn’t find anything that replaced the features I was using. Notion is limited to online-only, which makes it a security risk—your data is never stored locally. If Notion becomes unavailable, your account is lost, or you somehow lose access to it, you lose everything you ever stored in it.

I finally found Anytype. It’s a local-first, encrypted home for more than notes that syncs to your phone. I’ve been able to completely replace Notion with it!

Backblaze Backups

After almost a decade of backing my Mac up to an encrypted backup on Backblaze servers, I deleted my data and account. I just couldn’t bring myself to trust the future of their encryption and software anymore, considering they too are subject to Trump despotism. I replaced Backblaze with an encrypted TimeMachine backup on my NAS, which in tern is backed up to a server in Germany.

An Outlook

This project is ongoing, and I am working right now to replace as many iCloud features as I can. You can expect more parts in this series: “The Great Untangling”, in the future. Currently, my main concern is that there is no company in Europe that makes products like Apple does. My Mac, my iPad, my iPhone, and my Apple Watch are unlikely to be replaced by non-Apple products anytime soon—although the software running on them now mostly talks to servers owned and run by companies from Canada and Europe.

I try to look at all this with some optimism. Hopefully, more public and private institutions in the EU will decide to switch away from US software, services, and operating systems. Instead of every one of them building their own little Linux variant, eventually, I hope, they will collaborate to found companies here, and define open standards. I want to hope that at least one of those companies will be a design-driven company that competes with Apple.