Sovereignty

With the current geopolitics it is worth looking how to be more digitally sovereign. For me this has two aspects. Firstly, to use online services that are local and second to do as much as you can yourself (within your abilities of course).

Locally sovereign

Living in Europe this means avoiding most big tech, which is hard. Nevertheless, I've managed to make the following changes:

  • Laptop: Ditched Windows, now running Debian Linux
  • Browser: Ditched Edge, now using Vivaldi, both on laptop and phone.
    • This works well. The overall experience is not as smooth as Edge or Chrome. By this I don't mean the speed, but the usability. Especially the addressbar does not always behave consistently or how I would expect. Nevertheless Vivaldi is worthy replacement.
  • Domain names: Moved off NearlyFreeSpeech (who are great, but not in Europe) and now ISNIC and Hetzner.
  • Websites: Moved off NearlyFreeSpeech and now using Hetzner on datacenters in Europe
  • Spotify is European, so OK.

Still to do:

  • Emails: Move email address from Microsoft and Yahoo.
    • Tried Proton, which is OK, but changing email has long term consequences. Not going to happen anytime soon.
  • Onedrive. Again, Proton is an option, still investigating other options.
    • This is another switch with long term consequences that also affects others.
  • Netflix: Cancel subscription. It's not really worth it, but it is addictive.
  • Getting off Google Android is almost impossible, but maybe I should try something like Sailfish (Linux phone / Finnish) or Murena (Android / French).

Self-sovereign

Beyond moving things local, I also looked into self hosting my websites on a local Raspberry Pi. Technically this works perfectly, using the exact same scripts as on the Debian VPS I was using. Rasbperry Pi OS is after all based heavily on Debian. But doing so securely and protecting the home network from attacks requires either a reverse proxy or something like Cloudflare tunnels.

So I made a Cloudflare account (which goes against local sovereignty) and set everything up one afternoon. This is all for free. The only thing which seemed unncesssarily complicated was getting external SSH access to the Pi. So I switched back to hosting the sites on the European VPS. Costs more, but the idea is not to save money, but to be sovereign. I expect this to cost more.

A European alternative could be NetBird. But it's not worth the hassle and risk to open my network to the internet.

Currently trying Nextcloud provided by Hetzner, but self hosting this is a lot of hassle and responsibilty without necessarily having the technical knowhow. It's also something which would affect the wider family who are all using the OneDrive subscription.

Conclusion

Some things done, other things likely to stay as is for a long time.