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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.

[1]: https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...

[2]: https://blog.ecosia.org/eusp/


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.


Mojeek (UK-based) does apparently have their own index.

The results are interesting, they aren't bad, just different. Localized search isn't great, but it might be perfectly fine if you're in the UK.


That's awesome. How have I never heard of them? After a few tests, the search results seem good, so I'm provisionally switching to them now.


Why Proton mail? I'm currently looking to switch away from GMail but I lack good/bad references about the different EU providers.


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.


> Vaultwarden for passwords

Just a note for anyone looking for alternative password managers - 1Password is Canadian!


Also very fairly priced. A family plan for five people is US$60 a year.




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