Moving My Digital Footprint out of the United States - Final Part

I’m trying to rely less on US services & tech as mentioned in the first part of this series, and by this point I’m as done as I want to be.

The last thing I had left to migrate, was my side project grønpension.nu (it’s in danish!) which is a site I help host, to allow users to easily submit a Power of Attorney to their pension fund, to vote to divest from fossil fuel companies.
This was the last service where I actively paid money to US companies every month.

I moved it from DigitalOcean to Scaleway which is an European cloud that I’ve worked with before, and that I’ve generally been fairly happy with.

The switchover was smooth-ish. I think it could have gone smoother if I had done a straight 1:1 transfer, but as the website is fairly seasonally active, I wanted to switch from an always-on to a serverless setup.

It took a few hours to figure out how to actually deploy it from Github on pushes to main - there are some Github Actions for Scaleway but they’re not necessarily super well maintained. I think that’s probably the cost of moving to an ecosystem that’s not quite as popular, and with a smaller focus on developer experience for small projects than DigitalOcean.

With that said, the whole thing took around half a day, and I was fairly happy with the setup.

After the migration I did get some error reports with iOS-specific "TypeError: Load Failed" errors, that I didn’t have the time to properly debug. However, scaling up the serverless capacity seemed to solve the issues. ¯\(ツ)/¯

This means that during peak season, Scaleway is a few euros more expensive per month than DigitalOcean, but peak season is almost over now, and by that time, I’m thinking I can scale the site down to 0, and save some money and electricity.

Final Status

This is the final stage of my migration away from US-based services for now. I’m not actively paying monthly money to US companies, which is good enough for me. My phone is still an Android, my debit card is still a Visa, and there’s no way to get around that.

But seeing as this is the last step, I figured I’d step back and take stock of how it all went.

• Switching to proton has been really painless. I was never a huge power user of Dropbox or Google’s cloud services, but I did pay for both of them for storage in multiple places - and proton ended up being much cheaper.
• Switching my email, which was the thing I feared the most, was actually fairly simple. The import & forwarding from Gmail worked pretty easily, and I don’t really miss it, apart from Proton botching a search every once in a while. I haven’t logged into my Gmail for weeks.
• Proton Docs is perfectly adequate for all my purposes and I don’t really miss Google Docs.
• I really wanted to switch my calendar over to Proton as well, but unfortunately the lack of tasks & reminders is a dealbreaker to me. If they add that, I’m switching over in a heartbeat.
• Ecosia is actually much better than I thought it would be. Last time I tried it, particularly local queries were kinda bad, but they’re perfectly alright now! For some queries though, a lot of Ecosia results are LLM-generated slop sites, and I really wish there was some way to exclude them. Google is better at filtering those out.
• I really wanted mistral to be as good as Anthropics models for coding, but it just isn’t. Though for chat-based interface for common queries, it’s perfectly adequate. I never use my ChatGPT anymore, and my company has also quit its subscription.