Since January 20th, 2025, many in Europe look at the bizarre events across the Atlantic and think: ”well, I can’t do anything about that, can I?”
Yes you can.
Building on the predictable, value-based politics of previous administrations, U.S corporations have effectively been able to digitally colonize the world during the past few decades. Some of our most critical applications now lie at the mercy of the U.S state, which legally has the power to order these services to do pretty much anything. With several years left of this regime and future election results uncertain, it’s time to fight back.
It’s no secret that I’m a EuroStack fanatic. Beginning in February 2025, I have been aggressively purging the United States of America from my personal digital stack as much as realistically possible. While the process continues, I now have a powerful lineup of European and Open Source digital services & solutions to purge Big Tech from your life, return integrity and control to your digital assets, and reduce risk while potentially saving money in the process.
This page will be continuously updated as my collection improves further. Chapters ordered by priority.
Last Updated: 2026-01-29
Chapter 1: Communications
— E-MAIL —
Let’s face it, e-mail is the backbone of literally our entire existence on the internet, and in some ways all of society. Some of your most critical and sensitive information will be passing through your personal e-mail account. However, a about 89% of global e-mail traffic as of early 2026 is controlled by commercial, non-encrypted, privacy-invasive services like Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail. Not only is your inbox continuously scanned for advertising value, you are entirely at the mercy of the United States Government, who will shut off access as soon as you are branded a political enemy.
My solution? Proton Mail.
This Switzerland-based service is famous for state-of-the-art security and customer privacy. It is controlled by the non-profit Proton Foundation, which actively contributes to the free internet and European digital autonomy through annual financial grants and strategic partnerships with other European providers. All servers are located in Europe.
The free tier of the service includes full basic day-to-day capacity, with a free address and 1GB of storage. As long as you keep your inbox clean, the free tier is more than enough for day-to-day usage.
The Plus tier drastically extends your coverage to 15GB of storage, allows you to have 10 different addresses for your inbox, grants access to the exclusive ”pm.me” address, and even allows you to connect your own domain to Proton, letting you register Proton addresses that use your own domain rather than the ones provided by default.
The Unlimited tier grants premium access to all Proton services, including VPN, Calendar, Pass and Drive, while extending your overall account storage to 500GB. In terms of additional e-mail perks, it extends your limit to 15 addresses and 3 custom domains. I personally pay for this package.
Proton Mail features an easy and simple migration tool that quickly allows you to import your existing inbox from your previous provider.
Taking control of your inbox and has never been this easy. Contact me for any questions!
Use my referral link https://pr.tn/ref/T66CS4MB for 2 free weeks of Mail Plus!
— DIRECT COMMUNICATION —
An uncomfortably large part of our personal communication is directly dependent on apps like Discord, Messenger, WhatsApp and Snapchat. Due to the convenience of these U.S providers, we tend to no longer prioritize getting people’s phone numbers – they’re after all your friend on that one app! That is until Trump invades Greenland and shuts off all of your U.S apps. Suddenly, you just lost all of your friends.
My solution? Matrix.
Matrix is a decentralized open communications standard. An open standard means that there is no ”Matrix” chat app that you use to access the service. Instead, there are a number of Matrix clients available, usually developed by people entirely unaffiliated with Matrix. A user of one client can interact with users of all other clients using the open standard. When you install a client, you log in with your Matrix account, not one created by the client.
Secondly, the service is decentralized. This means that you are not forced to rely on the servers of the app’s owner, as you for example would be on WhatsApp or Signal. Instead, the ecosystem is federated, where anyone who wants to can install a Matrix instance on their own server, becoming what is known as a homeserver. A homeserver is the server that your Matrix account is primarily based out of, and handles all of the network activity on behalf of your account.
The Matrix standard is developed and controlled by the Matrix.org Foundation, based in the United Kingdom. The foundation serves the goals of a free and open internet, where everyone has the right to digital privacy. It has also lobbied against Chat Control and Big Tech. I am personally a member of the Matrix.org Foundation.
To drive adoption of the standard, the same developers as Matrix are also behind 2 other projects:
– The Matrix.org homeserver – This serves as the de-facto default homeserver for the Matrix community. As it is run by the Foundation, it serves the goal of allowing people free access to secure communications. While most users are on the limited free tier, there is also a paid Premium tier, granting additional usage perks. Premium is provided for free to individual Foundation members. For all users not already favoring another homeserver, use matrix.org as your homeserver!
– The Element client – This serves as the de-facto default client for the Matrix community. Element is a modern, feature-heavy client that aims to combine the functionality of WhatsApp, Discord and Slack. I personally recommend using Element overall, as it’s the best out of every client I have seen.
Taking control of your DMs, public rooms and group chats has never been this easy.
If you need extra guidance: https://joinmatrix.org/guide/
Chapter 2: Software Development
(skip if not relevant to you)
— GIT HOSTING —
Despite no exact statistics available, it is believed (as of 2026) that GitHub holds a share of over 70% of all publically hosted code. With free storage, a strong network effect and with widespread adoption as the industry standard, what’s not to love?
GitHub, a U.S-based company with AWS hosting, is wholly owned by Microsoft. Using this power, Microslop is currently leveraging GitHub to train AI on every hosted repository and filling the platform with all kinds of corporate bloat. On top of this, U.S-hosted data is subject to U.S laws, creating concerns with not only availability, but also the usage of laws like DMCA to strike down your repositories.
My solution? Codeberg.
Codeberg is the European alternative to GitHub, ran by the Berlin-based nonprofit Codeberg e.V. The mission of this nonprofit is to provide free hosting for public code and has become one of the largest hosters of FOSS/open source projects. The nonprofit is a member-controlled organization, meaning that you as a paying Codeberg e.V. member get full voting rights within the organization – also making it the democratic alternative to GitHub. Donations are also accepted.
I am personally a member of Codeberg e.V.
Codeberg runs its own physical servers and is entirely independent. To prevent abuse of their small organization, they enforce several common sense limitations:
– You generally need to keep your repositories public. While very small private repos are allowed in order to protect secrets, documentation, keys and similar, it is not Google Drive and your project must generally be kept publically viewable and downloadable.
– Repositories with over 750 MiB of files should generally ask for manual approval from Codeberg.
On the bright side, the platform is built on Forgejo and runs way faster than GitHub due to less bloat. To allow for easy migration of repositories, there is a built-in tool where you simply input the link of your existing GitHub repository, which then gets cloned into a brand new Codeberg repository, while still retaining all commit and project history!
With the facts in mind, I encourage ALL developers to move their open source and public repositories to Codeberg immediately. Let’s democratize our code. https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up
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