It's one thing to visit the website, but I would be interested what % is actually migrating?
For me personally, I had to install the "Go European" browser extension [1] before I actually started switching, due to more frequent reminders, from using mostly chatGPT/claude to LeChat by mistral (which feels at least as good).
My Take-away: User stickiness is hard to break due to providers' walled gardens, even for me who is aware and willing to change.
For privacy reasons, I've already started slowly switching away from US providers before all this insanity happened. I've switched my Email to Proton (Swiss), cloud files to Filen (German), most LLM usage to Mistral (French), and search to Ecosia (German). [Edit: I've now switched to Mojeek; see comments below.]
But in the past two weeks, I've done the things I've previously put off because they require real work. I've set up a NAS and switched all of the remaining things. I'm now using Immich for photo hosting, Vaultwarden for passwords, Hoarder for bookmarking, and a self-hosted Standard Notes instance for note-taking, to-do lists, and saving articles for later reading.
I'm super happy with this setup. Immich, in particular, is absolutely fantastic; its default face recognition model works better than Google Photos, at least for me. Once you've set it up, you can log your family into the same NAS and have them use it, too.
Ecosia is just Bing and Google though [1], so basically American and not German.
It looks like they're planning to build a European index with Qwant [2], but their help pages still say they're on Bing and Google so I guess nothing materialized yet.
I don't believe any Western European search companies have their own search index, and Ecosia seems to currently have the best chance of growing into a real vertically integrated search provider, so I'm using them.
They're located in a country with relatively good privacy laws, they're big enough that I trust them to remain alive for the foreseeable future, they have relatively good uptime compared to other email providers, they're popular enough that they don't tend to land in spam filters, and their corporate structure makes them more immune to enshittification than other companies.
On the minus side, the way their email is set up means you can't easily use third-party email clients without using an intermediary tool (Proton Mail Bridge), and because email is encrypted at rest, their own email search is abysmal.
I started switching. Email was pretty easy to set up a new account with a different provider and to change on the main websites I use. Good way to "unsubscribe" to a load of spam as well. Switching apps or uninstalling where possible on the phone helped. No more google maps for example, and removing or switching things like gmail or chrome from the home screen also helped break the habit of checking them.
having your own ___domain is worth it for email portability.
no matter who is hosting your email (megacorp, a hn darling, your hosting provider, yourself) you get to keep your email addresses. this also means one of the primary means of authenticating you online is not kept hostage by any business.
even for free email services that don't support custom domains, you can likely set up mail forwarding for free or very cheap with your ___domain hoster, and set up 'send as' alias in your inbox.
Btw: The "Twitter to Nitter" browser extension is amazing if you occasionally still want to view a tweet, but don't want to connect to Twitter servers.
Changed default search-engine on my laptop and cellphone. I still use google but rather as a fallback and I have to actively type in google into the address-bar.
I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo as my standard search engine and I'm super happy with it. I found it quality-wise indistinguishable from Google, and even better since no sponsored spam.
Thanks for nudging me that way again. I'd tried DDG before and was slowly moving towards, but had still been relying on !bangs.
However, I just replicated the most obscure search request that I can remember, an extremely obscure automotive request for help - and, in one go, the DDG result actually got to exactly the end result it had taken me ages to Google.
On the other hand, I am mostly involved in startups where lots of tech choices need to be made from scratch. The startup I'm currently working for doesn't even consider US based tech solutions at the moment. And I think more startups that pop up nowadays will think twice before choosing non-EU based tech.
For me personally, I had to install the "Go European" browser extension [1] before I actually started switching, due to more frequent reminders, from using mostly chatGPT/claude to LeChat by mistral (which feels at least as good).
My Take-away: User stickiness is hard to break due to providers' walled gardens, even for me who is aware and willing to change.
[1] https://codeberg.org/K-Robin/GoEuropean