I'm using Zoho (Indian company, hosted in Europe). Maybe not perfect from a geopolitical pov, but it will do for now.

> how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_?

Yes, your own server at home. All countries have fundamentally the same problems, so you will have everywhere the same tradeoffs as a customer. So it really depends on what your specific circumstances and requirements are. If laws are your problem, then stay away from countries where you break them; otherwise, just don't go where they will sell your data for any random penny.

> or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...

WTF is this kind of demand? Those regulations do not concern you as a user, but can be very beneficial for you, don't you understand this?

lol, you want trustworthy stability without “too many” regulations. Good luck with that.

I’m not sure you know what instability means if you think the US is unstable. If anything, the fact that the dumbest person on the planet is in charge of the United States and the country still functions as well as it does proves a lot about the stability of the USA. The country runs on geopolitical easy mode.

Maybe there’s a libertarian fantasy novel where you can host your services.

GDPR is real, and real good

Runbox are a good option - company and servers in Norway: https://runbox.com/

Been around since 2000. They're also working on JMAP support and are the top financial contributor to the Stalwart mail server (https://opencollective.com/stalwart) so I think they'll have a more compelling offering soon.

Also worth keeping an eye on Thunderbird pro which will also use Stalwart: https://www.tb.pro/en-US/

So where do you want to host your email?

Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…

ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.

Singapore, Japan have reliable ISPs.

Proton is in Switzerland, which is not part of EU

Fastmail is australian

For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.

devault made sourcehut which I think is hosted in the netherlands

https://sr.ht

I tried it once, it's very opinionated and may not be suitable for what a lot of people think of when they're coming from something like Github. The required old-school patch-by-mail thing is a blocker for a lot of people.

I am boggled by the number of people who see "I really don't want to X" and then reply with "Here's how to easily do X!"

https://tangled.org :) We're hosted in the EU.

Regarding Forgejo [0] there are a number of other open providers listed on the delightful forgejo [1] curated list. In addition there is a Professional services repository [2] where services are listed in the issue tracker.

[0] https://forgejo.org

[1] https://delightful.coding.social/delightful-forgejo/#public-...

[2] https://codeberg.org/forgejo/professional-services/issues

Take a look at https://www.lcube-webhosting.de/en/svn-hosting-repositoryonl..., starts at 2.90 Euro. No personal experience, but the fact that they are still including SVN support tells you how long-established they are.

Google reviews: https://www.google.com/search?q=lcube&ludocid=91685905651961...

I think Sourcehut is EU based now.

For just the basics, self-hosting of git can be pretty easy. I use gitolite on a VPS.

https://gitolite.com/gitolite/

You can also get a refurbished thinkpad with Ryzen and 16gb of ram for 400€ or so on european Ebay.

You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.

Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.

I never understood why bother with these.

You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.

I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.

Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.

Buy and support vendors that ship proper Linux laptops. I know of Star labs and Nova Custom in the EU, both use coreboot as well.

> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?

It's a case of "better is not perfect".

Yes, the EU & it's member states allow the police quite a bit of access to data and servers. However, there are still decently functional checks and balances. Unlike China, unlike Russia, unlike the US, where there is a carte-blanche already employed by authoritarian governments.

What the line really seems to refer to is General data protection. While "the state spies on you" is one attack vector, and one certainly becoming dangerous for oppressed minority groups in the US, it's not the only one.

For most people, really, all people because the authoritarian systems rely heavily on data from breaches, the chief risk to one's wellbeing are said data breaches. Of companies recklessly collecting all data they can get their hands on and retaining it forever.

There, the EU does have notably better laws. Where data collection and retention are restricted, and user-requested deletion is a legal right. (Enforcement of this is still a mess.)

> but isn't the EU simply horrible when it comes to privacy of your data from a nosy government?

Depends on the country, as much as it would xState in the US.

I think OP means user-friendly in the relationship user-company, not user-government.

In what sense are governments in the EU more nosy than the one in the US or China?

If you have a good path and a bad path that may or may not converge sometime later on your journey, you still should walk the good path.

I think he means that he can have a catch-all, but to reply from that address, there needs to be an alias created on the account

It's the rule of law that attracts business.

You're not wrong. But no SaaS is forever. Price rises, bankruptcies, ToS changes, change of CEO etc. Being acquired by a US company is just one of the things that can happen.

For someone like the author, it's not a reason to stay with a US company

And helping European companies be more successful might prevent them from selling out...

> Google Search → Startpage (Vivaldi default)

Startpage is owned by an American advertising company https://system1.com

I've more or less made a similar migration towards non-US alternatives for most of my services. In my case, I switched from GitHub to Worktree (https://worktree.ca/).

I can't recommend Immich enough if you want to move off Google Photos.

I use them too. Highly recommend. Have never had an issue with them.

I've recently moved my storage to Jottacloud (Norway), highly recommend - they do - gdrive style storage - dropbox style synced folders - photo app/backups - PC folder backups with apps for mac/win and a cli for linux

Used them in my last project for around 5 years. They were boring in a good way and inexpensive.

I recently used Bunny for a small project. Pretty good experience. And they're rolling out new functionality at a good pace.

Too bad they don’t support mtls client certificates or something that would allow me to limit the connection to just their servers.

Hetzner and Bunny are solid choices for EU projects.

/r/BuyFromEU is a continuous enumeration of individuals posting from what US services to EU services they moved. I agree that these posts get uninteresting once you have seen a few. I would be more interested in I have used European service X for 6 months, these are the up/downsides I found, since they actually help people picking alternatives.

Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

Yes, check out https://www.gitlabhost.com/ It is based in the Netherlands

In Germany, netcup (https://www.netcup.com/) is also quite popular among customers who are

- small or midsize companies, or

- "hacker-minded people" (I know quite some "hacker-minded people" who rent a server or vServer at netcup),

since they offer quite a bit of value for the money. In opposite to Hetzner, netcup is more of an inside tip.

I self-host Forgejo on a Docker container. Thinking about it, this is actually the right way to go.

If you got public projects, then something like Codeberg is in fact the place to go. If you got private projects, why push to someone's cloud-hosted git service at all? Push to your own service like Forgejo and sync backups to a local hard-drive or even online using rclone.

One of the other comments mentions https://codefloe.com. I haven't tested and haven't yet checked their background, but they seem to allow private repositories.

To you people who moved email to a different provider… how did you do that, practically? Email signature, reply from another address and hope your contacts pick it up, or something else? How well did it work?

I have been a user of gmail since you needed an invitation to register, and even though I have felt for years the pressure to de-google myself, I find it a daunting task due to the amount of people/services that think my email account is gmail, and forever will be.

Don't worry, EU companies never become that successful

I've moved to pCloud for photos and I've found it to be a good alternative. One frustrating thing is that if you are cycling through your photos on the default pcloud app, they are usually slow to render which can be frustrating. Playing music on the app is also a little frustrating. It works, but it it's not an amazing UX. Other than that I am completely content with pCloud though, and I would recommend it.

One other thing to be made aware of is that the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there. It works, but it can be a little annoying at times.

For Photos, consider Ente (e2ee).

Instead of Startpage, try DDG (DuckDuckGo) - been using it now for several years instead of Google as I found no difference in search quality.

I'm still waiting and hoping that open street map becomes a viable alternative to google maps- it would be great to get a firefox of mapping (maybe not the best analogy, but....)

I definitely know that an open mapping solution could gain traction and be supported by bigger companies that would use it. It seems like a good candidate for the kind of collective OSS work that supports other projects- that there are enough big-enough companies out there that want an open non-google reliant mapping solution that are willing to pool resources.

I know that with mapbox and others that active work is being done, but it just doesn't quite seem like it's there yet.

> avoid giving money

You're paying for any of these?

Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?

>How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.

It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.

> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:

> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]

> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]

> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:

* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...

The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.

Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.

You are technically correct but seem to be applying common law standards to civil law countries.

Unlike common law judiciary, civil law judiciary in and of itself has investigatory powers and judges don’t just hear arguments but can order their own investigations and are significantly more independent than in common law.

This can cut both ways, yes in theory the judge can accept evidence the prosecution obtained illegally, but the judges can also call the prosecutions bluff and call their own witnesses or order an independent expert to provide their own opinion, even if defense is unable to.

At least there is still the rule of law and democracy in the EU

> How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?

Just to be clear, according to the DOJ, law enforcement officials in the US can search your home without a warrant if they suspect that you are a "Alien Enemy" [1].

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/25915967-doj-march-1...

US legal protections do not apply to EU citizens keeping their data in the US, do they?

So what's the point of this comparison, since if I host my data in the US they don't need a warrant at all?

I wish they had retained one awesome Thunderbird desktop feature on mobile as well - being able to set the "from" address on the go while composing the email, without having to add an identity/sender-mail in advance. Alas, it seems that hasn't been the case.

> What Is An Administrative Warrant?

> An administrative warrant is a legal document issued by a government agency, rather than a court, that authorizes the agency to take specific actions such as conducting inspections, searches, or seizing property. Unlike judicial warrants, administrative warrants are frequently issued on less than probable cause of a crime.

> Administrative warrants are typically used for regulatory or civil enforcement purposes and allow agencies to enforce rules and regulations within their jurisdiction, such as health inspections, building code enforcement, or immigration-related actions.

> The problem with administrative warrants is that they make the agency both the prosecutor and the judge in the very same matter. The entire point of having agencies go to court for a warrant is because courts are an independent branch with an independent mission. Rather than solely focusing on identifying and prosecuting violations of law, courts seek to check agency errors and overreach. When the very same agency that wants to execute a warrant is the one deciding whether it issues, those checks disappear, and Americans’ security pays the price.

https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/admin...

Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.

Don't make the same mistake again, get a domain so that you can keep using the same address when switching between providers. Then set up GMail to forward e-mail to your new address. Then slowly update the E-mail address in your account. You could even set up a label that gets attached to e-mails that arrived through your GMail address. In that way, you can easily see the stuff that still needs to be updated.

Untangling yourself from Google (or Apple, which is similarly hard), doesn't have to be all at once. Break it up in small steps that feel like individual wins.

One more note about using your own domain: avoid provider-specifict features like subdomain addressing (made it more work for me to move off Fastmail).

If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.

Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync

Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.

I did it with tons of accounts and services linked. It's not anywhere as daunting as you'd think (and I thought). Although it seems you don't want to move away from it so I'm not sure what point your comment serves to make.

i thought the same but ive actually moved twice now. first to protonmail whenever that came out, then again a few years ago to posteo. it actually didnt feel like that much work in the end. i set up forwarding and switched over a few accounts every week. i still kept my gmail account around for years just in case but there will be a point where you just know you have all the important things switched over

I let my old 4 letter .com domain expire around 2000ish and got suckered into the whole gmail etc thing after sitting on university and hotmail for a while

In 2019 I decided enough was enough and registered a new domain and started moving my accounts over as new ones came up, or I updated addressing

I have very little left on gmail now other than spam from old services I no longer use. Top one in the inbox at the moment is Facebook telling my I have "530 notifications about X". Its sad how desperate they are.

Crazy expensive for small projects

AFAICS the cheapest option is 250€/month. That seems geared towards businesses, not individuals.

Thanks, uruky sounds quite promising, giving it a try

For anyone who wants some eco-optimism, Ecosia has a youtube channel where they film their reforestation efforts.

I use mailbox for the past few years and I think it's the best option out there. But they have one major issue, which is that anyone can impersonate your domain:

https://userforum-en.mailbox.org/topic/anti-spoofing-for-cus...

Ecosia is just Google/Bing depending on location.

Qwant is the way to go

Hasn't TomTom completely pivoted to OpenStreetMap? From direct contact, I know that they are very active in OSM communities now.

No system is perfect. It's more a theoretical risk for now, if you're not running a shady business.

...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)

proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.

There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.

It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.

Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.

Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.

Have been using mailbox.org with a custom domain (including catch-all wildcard) for the last 5 years or so, so it's definitely possible and as far I remember quite straightforward.

Haven't used it, but I've been intrigued by git-bug (stores issues in got itself) for years, to use as the issue/pr sync.

Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...

Hmmm this looks like a really nice option! Any issues with deliverability?

Works for me as well.

Yea been using mailbox.org for couple months and i can send from any address of my own domain...this is bad article. He probably doesn't know how to.

Can confirm, I use mailbox.org with my own domain and can send from any *@mydomain

Does their Zimbra implementation support 2FA ?

Just for completeness, both PagerDuty and incident.io offer EU hosting.

While it's in your bio, I feel like you should have made it more obvious that this is your company

I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.

This is already a crazy take on its own, why would a fork have to describe their relation to the parent project front and center? Both the Readme and the comparison page link to the origin blog post [1] that describes the lineage clearly.

But even if there were some "ethical reason" to do this, I don't think Gitea is the right project to play up as a victim. Their homepage [2] doesn't mention that Gitea itself is a fork either. Their Readme does, but is this so much better?

[1]: https://forgejo.org/2022-12-15-hello-forgejo/ [2]: https://about.gitea.com/

Also based on your reply on a sibling thread, is this a legit question (you expect that there is a way but you're not sure how) or are you just waiting for someone to bite just so you can state your case about proving a negative?

Because I don't mind paying github $4 or $7 and not worry about the admin burden.

Of course, this goes for simpler setups where you only use the git hosting part. Because to switch providers you only have to change the remote and push.

If you got yourself dependent on their other pipelines, it's more complicated.

That sounds good. I'm a bit confused about missing pricing. It says free tier is generous but I can't find any prices.

When first migrating away from Hotmail as a teenager, I just registered for new accounts/contracts on my own domain and migrated only the stuff I was still actively using

At some point I downloaded the emails from Hotmail by adding the account to Thunderbird and copying the contents to a local folder. Probably imapsync or some other dedicated tool would be more reliable but it seems to have worked for me (don't forget to also copy the sent folder). I don't really look back at it anymore, after a few years nothing of interest lands there. It's still out there though. Data hoarder issues with definitively deleting the data from it

I'd keep the account name just in case someone finds that it can be re-registered and used to gain access via password reset somewhere

Yes, pretty much. I bought a domain to make sure I only have to do this once and parked it with Infomaniak.

Then I setup a new mail account (by now I abandoned Proton for Infomaniak there as well)

The next year I just kept responding with my new email address, asking people to update their contact data and each time I logged in somewhere I changed my email address. This went really well, just 1 or 2 services where I couldn't change it because they only accept the big providers, no custom domains.

In the end the first 3 weeks were really painful, afterwards it was smooth sailing.

Since then I've swiched provider quite a bit from Proton to Zoho and now to Infomaniak (where I will stay for a long time I think) and each of those changes took me about 2h each time.

So in sumnary, you will curse yourself for a few weeks and thank yourself later!

I auto-forwarded to protonmail and replied from there. It took two years before I stopped receiving email that way.

Their whole point was to avoid US companies.

Weird, I've worked for multiple that got acquired by US companies

I was on gmail since the invitation too. Using their domain.

I started to use my own domain within Gmail 2 years ago. Transitioned things I cared about to use that email at that time.

Then this years I moved to Proton using that domain. And I'm forwarding Gmail to proton indefinitely.

I told my family, friends to start using that address going forward.

Slowly but surely as I get email into my gmail folder on proton I take the time to go change the address.

The big change is using an address from you own domain.

If you use their domain, its a paint and you need to do the steps you mention. If you have your own domain for emails, its basically a line in the dns settings and your emails go to the new provider. Everyone should own their E-Mail domain

Consider ecosia for search. It's not perfect but is decent for most general searches

This is a lot simpler if you own a personal domain name. You’re still going to have pain setting that up the first time, but afterwards any future migrations will be much easier.

> the macOS ecosystem seems to be a little hostile towards pCloud and it seems to be fighting a never ending battle in order to the get the remote drive functioning reliably there

pCloud seems to have been having a few wobbles in the past few months, and it's unclear to me whether the root cause is external or internal. Two different Windows machines both needed manual removal and reinstallation, and the Mac installation needed manually updating to a later version due to (apparently) an SSL certificate renewal. FWIW the current version on my Mac (on Sequoia) seems solid outside of rarely needing to select 'Enable Drive' from the menu.

Most of those services are paid by terrible people when you use them.

Look at their revenue breakdowns.

The usual proof is whether law enforcement agencies can force the company to share such data

But their servers are in the US.

Fastmail's servers are in the US: https://www.fastmail.help/hc/en-us/articles/1500000280221-Ho...

> For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.

The Queen died of 8th September 2022.

I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.

My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).

> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…

– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSE

If you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.

You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.

The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.

If you buy directly from Mullvad, they delete the transaction details after two weeks. Sure, your payment procesor knows you’ve bought from Mullvad, but in this case so does Amazon, no?

Regarding Migadu, after extensive research it seemed to be the best option, but man that 20 outgoing emails limit is just so off-putting and the next tier is so far apart. I would be comfortable paying 50-60 euros per year for 50 outgoing emails, but no, it’s either 20 for 20 euros or 100 for 90 euros

Also https://uberspace.de/en/

Lyft pays people to help map in OSM. meta and Microsoft have both made big contributions as well (like allowing the use of Bing imagery)

> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism

A similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.

Lol what does ICE have to do with a local police officer being able to bully a tech worker into providing your private communications?

His comment did not even mention the US. Only critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU. One of the issues with modern politics is everyone wants to deflect.

What do you miss about Google Maps in OSM? Just business information (schedules, contact info, reviews...), or something else?

> the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order

The EU is just one AfD win away from doing the same thing. It's not immune to this issue either, you have the same problem happening right under your noses.

For me:

- SES was a big one. There was no affordable alternative at my (not big, not small) scale.

- I'm still waning myself personally of GMail. That dependency took decades to build and it will take years for all ties to sever.

I'm not advertising the US here or trying to troll. I'm an European pointing out things about the European system that many here will not have thought about.

>It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.

Maybe keep your US nonsense to yourself?

Start by the fact that in their system you are just a random number that is generated at the moment you arrive in their website. They make very easy to pay without having to use any of your personal data, like Credit Card. Overall I think if a company put so much effort on that side, they simply don't have any data to log, or if they do is pretty anonymous anyway :)

If the goal is to stay away from US or European influence then the Russians would be a better bet.

> Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.

I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")

Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?

...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)

You misunderstand this. Yes, there have been moves by some in the EU to reduce privacy, but they face resistance and have actually been repelled often. The ChatControl debacle you mention is one such instance. And on the other hand, sometimes there is actual progress, like with GDPR.

But more importantly, at least there are privacy laws in the EU that do something. In the US, there are virtually none, so of course you won't hear about their erosion.

I trust the EU ten times more than the US in this regard.

And a nice blog [1] too!

[1]: https://blog.ecosia.org

Oof, what a drag

Both use Google and Bing, though not exclusively, and both joined efforts to create the new, independent EUSP index.

Sources for Ecosia indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosia#Ecosia

Sources for Qwant indexes/providers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwant#Development

EUSP: https://www.eu-searchperspective.com

OSM is one of multiple data sources for TomTom.

TomTom isn't OSM, they just use OSM as one input among many into their mapping model. OSM has significant limitations as a standalone mapping model but many companies find it useful for augmenting more sophisticated mapping models.

Thanks, please reach out with any suggestions or problems you find!

Fastmail runs exclusively of AWS in the US.

I looked into this, there are lots of people in forums discussing/ asking for EU based servers.

The stated reason in the article seems like Switzerland should be as good as EU, if not better.

> I have decided to move as many services and subscriptions as possible from non-EU countries to the EU or to switch to European service providers. The reasons for this are the current global political situation and improved data protection.

"or switch to European service providers". EU or not, CH is still in Europe, so would qualify?

> doesn't do anything but make your life harder.

No it also encourages the local market and healthy competition. This way in the future we don't fall into the same enshittification trap.

Honestly, the instability of the political environment in US feels so extreme, that it seems like something could bite you that you didn't even see coming.

Just on the Gmail front: maybe Trump decides to trade embargo you country and pressures Google to cut off email access. Maybe he decides Google needs to be broken up and sold for parts, and Gmail's data goes to Truth Social. Maybe he thinks illegal immigrants or "radical left wing lunatics" shouldn't have access to American email providers and gets Google to start suspending accounts based on a some criteria. Maybe some of this seems far fetched, but we are talking about a president who threatened to to go to war with one of America's closest allies.

The non-American west's exposure to the instability is too high, and already affecting people. Switching software providers where possible is something that can be done quickly, and relatively easily by individuals in the short term.

With google, the problem is that their "AI" can randomly ban you though. And the only recourse is making it to the top of HN. If that even works any more.

I think GDPR is a good example of why it doesn't really work in practice.

I think the fines and enforcement have been a generally good balance to the status quo in the USA.

But- in practice, is your data materially used differently than in the USA?

The problem is that no one is abandoning facebook, instagram or youtube and that data is being used in the exact same way as it is in the USA- to sell you things and track you across the web. Technically there are more barriers to getting and using that data, but I would argue that it's not a blocker, just an inconvenience to those using that data- it just makes the targeting etc. 10% less accurate. The whole system still runs the exact same way.

And, to make it look like it seem like it works now everyone has to deal with these dumb popups that don't mean anything.

I agree, as a happy Runbox customer of several years. But probably the parent post meant non-EEA too, as Norway is effectively subject to any and all EU regulations.

I find it odd that EU is judged by efforts that have time and time again _failed_, when I'd see that as a perfect example of a system actually working, because people do have the power to stop hostile legislation, whereas I see no such thing at all in the US.

Can recommend Runbox for a lot of reasons, but one gotcha that bothered me in day-to-day use was that emails are delayed by a minimum of 30 seconds, with no real upper bound, just a probability curve with, say, the 90th percentile around 5 minutes. On rare occasions, that means OTPs or login links valid for 5 minutes have expired when you get them. Yes this was really on Runbox' side, yes I talked to support, yes they cared, yes they subsequently ghosted me when delivering the requested headers of emails delayed for more than 5 minutes which they considered a normal delay "because email wasn't supposed to be real-time" (be that as it may, that doesn't take away that you sit there 30 seconds... 60 seconds... 90 seconds, wondering if you should go do something else while you wait for the confirmation link and get back to your current task later)

Seriously though, nothing but recommended in every other regard. Alias management, anonymous domains you can use, configuring the sender in Thunderbird no problem, everything else was great. My colleagues didn't seem to mind this delay so much as me so it's something to be aware of but might work fine for you

Edit: I realised this is already like four years ago now, it could have gotten fixed in the meantime. It was an issue for several years before we switched away for some reason related to calendars (don't remember the details, I wasn't my choice)

Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.

It's still the same population that voted for Trump twice. It's the same constitution, the same parties, the same oligarchie and the same god-king like office of the US president.

Nothing will change with respect to trust after the midterms.

Recently Runbox had a couple significant outages which made me rethink hosting my email with them. I and my family have used them for many years and I liked what they offered (didn't like bad web UI) but will probably be migrating to Fastmail or other when my current subscription expires.

I was disappointed more by their lack of communication than by the outages. And one outage wasn't even reported on their status page although they confirmed it via support. That's a very bad communication.

Promise?

Isn't Proton planning to move to .de?

Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?

The geo-location of where you keep your data is irrelevant to US legal reach.

Don't forget civil forfeiture, which can (an does) happen whether they think you're an enemy or not.

https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...

They don't, they don't even apply to EU citizens keeping their (our, in fact) data on our (EU's servers) if what we're doing happens to cross some interests of the US Government. I mean, there are some legal "protections" in place for that, but notice the quotes. Thinking otherwise is delusional, but, hey, people should be allowed to enjoy the liberty of their slightly larger iron bird-cage.

I think that is not up to date. Mailbox publishes DKIM records: https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...

SPF is here https://kb.mailbox.org/en/private/custom-domains/spf-dkim-an...

DMARC is up to the domain owner to set.

The US is sliding to a place that many EU countries are happily occupying and pontificating from

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/07/06/since-20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/nov/17/refugees-jew...

The police will of course decide if you are running a shady business.

As EU citizen I at least got some influence into EU policy. A government far away doesn't even have to pretend to care about me.

Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.

If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)

While I agree in principle, I have to remind you (and to myself) that Australia is part of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Yup, I don't get someone who would look at the US and say that their government overreach is particularly bad compared to the rest of the "first world". For example, the UK is arresting people for getting too spicy in school Facebook groups[1]. It just feels like "grass is greener" mentality because folks on here are most familiar with US political issues.

[1] https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/police-arrest-...

Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.

For anyone wondering:

EAW = European Arrest Warrant

EIO = European Investigative Order (basically lets different jurisdictions demand information from each other)

CJEU = Court of Justice of the EU (think of it as a supreme court)

You forgot about the Nordic countries.

Yeah, but you also have Hungary who can decide to do things the same way they're done in Sweden and Finland.

Is there really? Governments routinely go against the ECHR and the ECJ, and do nothing to rectify past violations when ruled against.

On a national level, sure.

The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.

For now – the EU is one AfD win away from following in America's footsteps.

The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.

When you have a custom domain you can list @mydomain.com as sending domain allowing you every string before the at character. So that means you could use 50 different domains with infinite adresses on these domains.

It's a team of 10+ people though.

I have like 20-ish[0] people using my Migadu account and I've only hit the hard limit once, and it was because one of them was trying to do a mailing list....

Once I got them on a better path, I haven't had any issues. I don't remember what plan exactly, but I've been a customer for a long time, since they were founded pretty much.

0: I host a non-profit and we use my migadu account, since they are broke and I'm too lazy to count the actual number.

That's the host mentioned 6 times in the article.

Trends are various. You had Poland remove rightwing goverment 2 years ago (yes and elect righwing president few months ago). Romania electing a European centric president.

We can go on. EU is not a single country, not a single community of people.

what example are you talking about? assuming it's non-UK would like to read about it.

I've been using FairEmail[1] for some years now as a replacement and find it superior to the gmail app. Of course, depending on your needs and tastes, I could also understand calling it a bit clunky. It is FOSS, but has a one time pay premium option for some advanced features. But really, it's also just fair to support the dev by buing the app. My only complaint would be, that there are to many updates, but of course, you can just ignore them and do them every few months instead.

[1] https://email.faircode.eu/

thunderbird (formerly k9 mail) is a decent enough android app, but im not very picky when it comes to email either so keep that in mind. ive been using it with posteo for about 2 years now

The post is about moving stuff from US to EU, so it's not like the US is brought up out of nowhere.

Maybe this comment downthread helps for the email problem? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47489711

Somebody else, but there is no good OS mobile app for OSM. CoMaps is clunky currently.

Giftcards from Amazon will be enough of a stumbling block to stop copyright trolls and such.

it won't even slow down actual criminal investigations by nation states and might not even stop a determined civil suit.

The gift card is a scratch off and has a number that is used to fund your Mullvad balance. So Amazon doesn't know which instance of the gift card you ordered, meaning there's no link to your specific Mullvad account payment.

The authorities might know you ordered a gift card, but not which Mullvad account you funded it with.

While their account privacy policy is commendable, it isn't a proof for not collecting logs.

Even without personal details you can collect quite a lot of data - ip address that uses certain VPN account, which servers it talks to while using vpn, at what hours, at what intervals, also all the plaintext data exchanged between client and server. A lot of data that someone (who might already have your ip address mapped to your personal info, for example your ISP, or an online store where you shopped something before you turned on the VPN) would be willing to pay good money for. And companies like money.

Or send cash in an envelope.

Doesn't cost extra

No need to share my cc with yet another company.

open source is all fun and games until they fork you

SPF or DKIM maybe?

Amazon also uses and contributes edits to OSM.

>(though currently a little bit less marked)

Again this is a false equivalence, 'a little less marked' isn't close to imparting the true state of things and to be honest a little disingenuous.

The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states. The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.

So 'ah yes but Hungary' doesn't persuade me even though I'll concede it's a problem for the EU. If Tisza is elected in April, Hungary will be on course to turn things around. So you're comparing 1 out of 27 to 50 out of 50 states.

AFAIK there's no murdering of citizens going on in any EU member country by the same countries government at the moment.

I need to host my emails somewhere. This means that you can't reject the EU in isolation, you have to compare it to the alternatives. And the most prevalent alternative is the US

Now of course if somebody has a better alternative that's neither in the EU nor US (nor Russia, or China) that'd be interesting to hear about

The comment does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a thread where the topic is, eminently, migrating away from US services to EU ones.

Not really.

Most European countries have parliamentary democracies.

It's not a winner-takes-all system ala presidential and semi-presidential republics where effectively individuals:

1. rule without opposition. There's no opposition it's not represented in that branch.

2. rule without even needing support of their own parties. The Italian prime minister or the German chancellor have to fight every day in parliament to have support of their parties and the other parties coalitions.

3. a single individual can claim popular mandate. In parliamentary systems you vote for parties/coalitions, not individuals

There's a reason why this authoritarian trend goes from the Philippines, Nicaragua, to Belarus, to Turkey, to Russia, to most African countries and now US. They are all presidential republics.

The last parliamentary democracy to turn authoritarian has been...Sri Lanka. Almost 50 years ago. Presidential ones? It's basically every year.

Systems with winner-takes-all mechanics do not represent voters, and power is too concentrated.

Parliamentary democracies might be labeled as less efficient, that I can agree, but they have strong antibodies to such people.

See Austria or the Netherlands as examples where strong far right authoritarian-wannabes individuals became prime ministers...and then nothing happened and their governments didn't last.

> critiquing the authoritarianism going on in the EU

What?

Europeans are so blind to how they are essentially on the same path as the US, the US just got there first.

I’m in the US and generally pretty level-headed. Nothing makes me become a red-blooded patriot nationalist temporarily faster than seeing Europeans completely ignore the similarities in our political ills. It always boils down to, “but it’s the good kind of authoritarianism we have that preserves social order!!!” as if that has never failed to produce desired results. Thanks for being much more rational. We have a concerning political trend here in the US, it can’t be denied, but the EU is following in step.

Just saying, the vast majority of services people are moving from would be US based given it is where all of big tech comes from. So comparing it to the US is relevant?

If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.

Yes but that has the same downsides as China.

If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at rest

And with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.

Nintendo may also decide this.

https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...

The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access

Fastmails servers are in the US IIRC.

Also IANAL: I Am Not A Lawyer. If you really want to guard yourself from a legal standpoint, write the full sentence. "IANAL" could mean anything.

That being said, I am not a lawyer, I am not a legal professional, this is not a legal advice.

Scandinavian law is commonly considered to be a subcategory of civil law. Judges in Scandinavia have investigative powers and can judge the truth of the matter.

Given the last year, it doesn't seem like any level of suppression of freedom is in fact unthinkable for Americans.

Lack of records isn't the issue. You authorize mailbox's servers to send on behalf of your domain. Then they let anyone with a mailbox account set the from to your domain.

What a disingenuous comparison. The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years. In contrast, the corresponding wiki article on the US ("Lists of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States" [1]) estimates more than 900 deaths per year. Indeed, the number of slayings is so great that the article does not tabulate the sum in a single table (as the German article does) but instead links to separate wiki articles with tabulated results by month.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_killings_by_law_enfor...

Do the immigration police in UK also murder their own citizens in broad daylight? What about incarceration (and falsely incarcerated) rates? What about general cases of police brutality? What about pedophile-run government where nobody ever gets arrested? What about a government that's bailing out known criminals for money? Or one that rug pulls its own citizens via crypto scams, phone scams, citizenship scams? USA is so far beyond comparison to any other country that it's not even funny. The whole place is a con artists paradise, run by con artists, for con artists.

Not to mention that they are actively hostile towards its own allies, threaten to annex ally territory, don't want to help its allies, and then when it can't pull off a war it on its own started, then EU is supposed to come help? And when we don't, we get insulted for not being friendly? Honestly, F USA, and everything that place stands for. What a toxic cesspool of a place.

So don’t host your stuff in Hungary?

Australia is a member of five eyes and the US basically treats them like the 51st state.

The US is at position 57 in the world free speech index. Virtually all EU countries do better and a bunch are top 10:

https://rsf.org/en/index

American exceptionalism doesn’t seem to know boundaries.

In Hungary, sure. But each country has its own jurisdiction.

Boiling down the different approaches to freedom of speech to "The baseline level is higher/lower", has always been a pretty simplistic (and if you would actually delve into the topic a little, flat out wrong) view .

Freedom of speech is not absolute. Neither in Europe nor in the US. Both effectively have rules restricting certain speech. For example, speech that may harm others, such as inciting violence or maybe the most famous example: "Shouting FIRE in a full venue".

European countries tend to spell out these restrictions more explicitly. It's completely reasonable to disagree with these restrictions. But the simple existence of them shouldn't lead you to the conclusion that one is "more freedom of speech" than the other.

And at last I want to add, that that is how it's been historically. Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".

Considering who we're comparing it to when discussing this topic: absolutely. Not even a question.

Anyone claiming otherwise is delusional at best.

Which cases are you talking about? Compliance with actual court rulings is pretty high.

> freedom of speech

Oh please. There's free speech without a free press (US ranks 57/190, behind Sierra Leone) people are just amplifying the same BS they heard from some ignorant influencer. I would argue even your idea of "active enforced blasphemy laws" shows that. That's worse than useless, that is detrimental to a society (case in point, the current president and his whole cabinet).

https://rsf.org/en/index

> We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws

In a very narrow interpretation, yes. Everyone with a modicum of common sense would realise that countries with laws on the books against offending religions / inciting hatred against them are still more free than a country where the fucking Bible is cited in court rulings and political speeches, and where there are active laws prohibiting non-religious people from holding office.

One is for keeping the peace, the other is actively meddling religion and politics.

> baseline level of freedom of speech

Being unable to spout Nazi ideology is technically a restriction on freedom of speech, yes. But again, anyone with a modicum of common sense (and a bit of historical understanding) would understand this to be a good thing.

The EU governance system is vastly different than the US, and not nearly as fragile. Even if AfD gets sway in one country, it doesn't mean that suddenly they can do anything they want like you saw in the last US election.

My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.

AfD is a party in single country in EU.

I mean you build a base for your oss tooling. You reject a base's notion, what do you expect?

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47492820

It's happening in the EU too, just not at such a fast pace than in other regions. And it's still far away from authoritarianism.

Currently it's just smaller pieces and no bigger agenda is visible (or even exiting). But there are constantly new regulations that would make an authoritarian coup (like currently in the US) easier.

Yeah, it's really bizarre how this has to be turned into a competition. We have stupid problems in the EU that don't exist in the US and vice-versa.

The way this particular part of our system works is downright horrifying, but it's exotic enough that very few people (even lawyers) will be familiar with it.

>If you're trying to say the eu isn't a saint either, sure.

I'm not trying to say anything about anyone else besides the EU. Therefore I'm certainly not trying to compare EU to anyone else.

I am an European pointing out issues with the local system, issues that many commenters here clearly aren't aware of given how many replies seem to think that they'll be just fine as long as they don't host in Hungary.

Not every European country, but unfortunately many countries are at risk. Someone like Orban is so deeply and openly corrupt, you have to wonder why anyone besides his cronies vote for him. But as an autocrat, you apparently only have to chase lgbti people and immigrants to cheer people up. Going to CPAC with all your kinky friends doing the Sieg Heils on stage (yes, that happened, even if someone doesn't want to hear that). Conservatism is a depressing view of the world.

And then you have all kinds of charlatans that are basically Orban doubles. You hear the same stupid talking points and bullshit, the same cozying up with Putin. And to top it off, the USA has openly vowed to fuel and fund that fire of self destruction, so the billionaires can eat the corpse. Because that is where the term conservatism came from, to conserve the power of the king and the ruling elites, as a god given construct (the only original moral aspect of conservatism).

While there is a trend toward the right in many (not all) EU countries, it's a far cry from the shit show on the other side of the Atlantic.

And that's pretty much the thread. You're either subject to a large power's jurisdiction or subject to a jurisdiction whose sovereignty is at the pleasure of large powers... Pick a threat model, plan appropriately, and keep things in perspective.

>If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly

Or move to Russia. Not recommending, just saying

It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.

Even Apple Maps is heavily, heavily behind Google Maps simply because very few users are entering Point of Interest info into Apple Maps.

New restaurant opens, or store closes, or opening hours change? Google Maps has the updated info within a few days. Apple Maps in a year or two, maybe.

That's the moat. The only way either Apple or the other corpos catch up is by offering massive financial incentives for their users to contribute PoI data.

> The US should it not turn this around in the midterms is finished as a liberal democracy.

I wish there was an easy way for me to bet against the imminent fall of the United States as predicted by so many internet commenters. I don’t like what the current administration is doing, either, but I would readily bet against all of these “the end is just around the corner” or “the empire is dying” takes in a heartbeat.

>The EU is not in full motion to dismantle democracy across her 27 states

But it is? They forced Romania to do a re-election because they didn't like the candidate. And they still try to force Chat Control, try to bypass the unanimity rule and the EU commission gives itself more powers every day with authoritian laws like the DSA. As a European, I don't get the USA's EU-fetish. It's not better here than in the US.

I agree that presidential systems in particular are problematic, and the EU is lucky that Germany and France use parliamentary systems. But the nasty thing about populism is that it happens in waves and it does overtake parliaments. We need only look at what happened to the UK with Brexit for a recent example. It's not hard to imagine that a wave of far-right populism could one day overtake Germany, or send France's RN, Austria's FPO or Poland's PIS to a majority position.

We can cross our fingers and hope that nobody would work with them (I know that Germany's parties all have a pinky promise not to work with AfD), but it was only 10 years ago that everyone in the US was laughing at the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – and now here we are, much sobered. These things happen, and AfD, or RN, or whoever, could wreak havoc to the EU from within the EU if they took power and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs and more.

Switzerland, maybe? I've been a happy migadu.com customer for years already.

>The comment does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a thread where the topic is, eminently, migrating away from US services to EU ones.

Even then, there's no interesting conversation to be had unless we pretend it does.

Anywhere you can rent a VPS or dedicated server, install exim or mox or mailcow. Configure dns correctly and you're good to go

Sorry what? While there are right wing idiots in various governments in the EU, the Trump admin is on a completely different level. Also the bosses of big tech are clamouring over each other to s** him off.

I’m not particularly patriotic or bothered about nations in general, but the yanks can go take a hike.

Most European countries have functioning legal and electoral systems, and more than two parties. On top of that, constitutional courts aren't political appointments.

So it would be incredibly hard for a political entity like AfD or RN to gain full and absolute power like the orange has achieved. Even in the worst cases, those parties usually only have ~30% popular support at most, which usually translates to at most ~30-40% of seats in parliament. Which means they cannot even get parliamentary majority, and probably can't get head of state either.

Americans just like to pretend things aren't that bad and they aren't the only ones falling into the abyss.

I see, so their SMTP authentication is woefully broken and they let anybody who can send an e-mail from their SMTP server to put anything in From: ?

Indeed. USA is gone, got taken over and is now RUSA. The rest of the world can see it. Look at the pain their latest stupid war is inflicting on Europe. Cui bono...

>What about pedophile-run government where nobody ever gets arrested?

This is just complete nonsense. We are not run by pedophiles. Nobody is being arrested because the people you want arrested have committed no crimes. Being in the Epstein files doesn't make someone a pedophile.

But their free speech protects bribing the politicians with campaign donations. It's true that we don't have such advanced laws over here.

> Shouting FIRE in a full venue

"Crowded theater"? In any case, yes, that's a popular understanding of limits on free speech in the US, but it's actually been superseded twice - first by "clear and present danger," then by "inciting or producing imminent lawless action." These days, it's probably (I am not a lawyer) legal to yell "fire!" in a crowded theater under many circumstances.

> Sadly, the recent developments in US show pretty well how freedom of speech cannot be measured by "How many specific laws are there about things I cannot say?".

There are no laws preventing you from saying anything in the US, unless you are specifically, directly inciting people, at that moment, to do things that break other laws. That's the point. You can't measure it in terms of degrees of restrictions; the US has none, and all European countries have at least some. The latter approach opens the floodgates to restrictions on any kind of speech that the government doesn't like. The US Constitution prevents that from ever happening.

Want a particularly egregious example? Here: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=celex:62...

Police in many EU countries was systematically searching suspects phones without mandatory due process. This was prima facie illegal, everyone involved knew it. They did it regardless.

Yeah, this decision eventually resulted in many governments issuing new guidance, and some countries rewriting their national legislation. Is that a big victory for the rule of law? I think not, the national governments should not be knowingly violating the ECHR in the first place.

It took Ireland years from an ECHR ruling to rule buggery was not unlawful, and Ireland was given a special exemption to the EUs abortion laws which remained in place for 26 years.

> My understanding of the EU system is that it's far more proportional in representation, and a simple 51% isn't enough to have 100% control. Parties still need to work together and compromise.

We've already seen with Brexit that 100% control is not needed in a parliamentary system to destroy a country's livelihood. But my point was that AfD doesn't need something like "presidential control" of the EU, it would just need to start working with other far-right parties in the EU such as Hungary and France's RN to sow chaos from within. Is that very far-fetched? You can't tell me that most of Europe doesn't hold its collective breath at every French election, crossing their fingers that Le Pen's party doesn't win this go around.

AfD is a far right populist party in the EU's biggest economic powerhouse country, whose explicit goals are to leave the EU (they probably can't due to the German constitution), exit the eurozone, withdraw from the Paris climate deal, leave NATO, and cozy up with Russia.

It's not hard to imagine what kind of damage they could do to the EU if they took power in Germany and started working with Hungary to block EU legislation, veto sanctions, defund programs, etc.

> 552 people over the last 100 years

What a disingenuous comment. Do we really think that is the case?

You ignored my other link. Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry. Yet, Denmark gleefully does that.

Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.

Per capita vs absolute numbers seems particularly relevant here.

There are four times as many people in the US.

Germany has four cities with around a million people.

The U.S. has at least 15.

Also, absolute numbers don't reflect justified shootings, which is an entirely different and much more nuanced conversation.

No part of this should be taken to mean that I don't think there's a problem in the US, I just object to complex issues being overly simplified.

>The wiki article you've linked ("List of killings by law enforcement officers in Germany") sums to 552 people over the last 100 years

I think we can probably agree that this number is not very accurate.

Yeah I think this basically answers this entire sub-thread

Heyyy! I thought Canada was the 51st state!? Get in line Aussies!

You linked to a site about press freedom, which is a subset of free speech and not generally what Americans are talking about when they talk about freedom of speech.

It's worth reading the specific actions they cite that lower the US's ranking. They include the closure of Voice of America, a government-run propaganda outlet for foreign audiences (and I do think that closure is bad! just not relevant at all to free speech); mergers of several big media conglomerates; not to mention, bafflingly, restrictions on journalism by the Iranian government in Iran, which somehow counts against the US.

None of this says anything about Americans' right to speak freely, which is absolute, unlike in any European country.

Yeah, way to not read the thread.

I'll repeat: EIO

A whole lot of websites are inaccessible from my country when there's football on, due to a judicial order meant to curb piracy.

The whole deal with Chat Control is also not to be forgotten. I do think you guys see this place with rose tinted glasses sometimes.

The far right is ascendant in Europe; obviously restrictions on speech haven't prevented that. I am Jewish, I have a strong dislike of Nazis, and yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society. Criminalizing speech doesn't stop people from holding abhorrent beliefs.

This is an aspect of our country that I think most Americans are proud of. Some relevant reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

> It doesn't matter if Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook contribute or pay huge sums.

It may not matter for your purposes (i.e. replacing Google-Maps-the-product in your daily use as a consumer).

I'd naively expect that having hundreds of thousands of Amazon drivers dogfooding these maps daily does help with data quality though. So maybe OSM dataset works best as a Google Maps replacement if you can shoehorn your usage into something that overlaps with the things a gigantic logistics operation cares about.

A few years ago I got annoyed at Google and switched to Apple Maps. Earlier this year I got annoyed with Apple Maps and tried Google Maps again before switching back. Point of interest data was a minor factor in all of this. It might be enough to lock me into using Google to find local businesses I didn’t know about before, but that doesn’t force me to use Google Maps for turn by turn navigation.

Well nobody has figured out the perfect political system yet.

Except the Swiss.

Funny enough, they mention moving to ProtonMail which is at least based out of Switzerland. It makes this whole chain a bit funny, but I don't blame the commenter for not breaking down every service the OP talked about and the OP did shorthand it to "Migrating to the EU", so fair enough.

Servers of migadu are in france actually

Man this whole article and your comment just makes me picture that meme with the fat guy open-mouth drinking from a pipe labelled "media".

By the way, sex him off? Trying to decipher the number of characters

I'm not pretending things aren't bad, I'm pointing out that things could be bad for you as well. America had functioning legal and electoral systems too, and we only need to look at Brexit for a shining example of how parliamentary systems can also fail to resist a populist wave. By refusing to acknowledge that, you look no wiser than the Americans who were laughing at the idea of a Donald Trump presidency just ten years ago.

EU did not force Romania. Romania itself annulled them because Russian intervention happened.

I didn't say the US is finished, I said it was finished as a liberal democracy.

It's already slid in to 'electoral democracy' instead of 'liberal democracy' the difference between the two is how 'rule of law' is prioritised and the balance between checks and balances between institutions is enforced.

https://www.v-dem.net/documents/60/V-dem-dr__2025_lowres.pdf

What actually happened was that former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton publicly stated on French TV in January 2025 that if the AfD won in Germany, elections there could also be annulled by the EU "as was done in Romania". That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen, he did not represent the EU in any capacity, and there is no evidence whatsoever that the EU pressured Romania. Of course, post-truth political movements run with a distorted version of this story to play the victim.

Romania's Supreme Court decision was based mainly on illegal campaign financing. The Constitutional Court noted that Georgescu had officially reported zero campaign expenditures, yet had an enormous social media presence. His TikTok account had over 646K followers and 7.2M likes. This was in the context of interconnected declassified intelligence. Around 25000 pro-Georgescu TikTok accounts became highly active in the two weeks before the first-round vote, with nearly 800 accounts created in 2016 that had remained dormant until the election. Activity was coordinated through a Telegram channel. Romania's intelligence service said there were signs of state-sponsored attacks operating in a hybrid manner, targeting critical infrastructure and shaping public opinion through misinformation. The campaign was said to mirror influence operations conducted by Moscow during elections in Ukraine and Moldova.

Romanian prosecutors later charged Georgescu with involvement behind cyberattacks targeting Romanian electoral systems.

Russia has been systematically attempting to interfere with EU elections, and anyone who argues otherwise in the face of mountains of evidence is either being naive or disingenuous. Post-truth political parties such as the AfD are funded and supported by the Kremlin, which is interested in sowing division and wished the collapse of the EU for a long time. Unfortunately, the current US administration is also ideologically aligned with the Kremlin and also wishes the collapse of the EU, as is explicitally stated in the recent strategic document published by the Trump administration. These are the actual facts, that are easy to verify if you are actually interested in the truth.

Didn't proton fold like a wet napkin when they were asked for information about their users? What I mean is: Switzerland as a whole is probably the wrong metric...

I, and apparently many others in this thread, disagree.

I personally found some interesting comments here, including but not limited to services based off EU that I can use.

If you find it uninteresting, you should stop wasting your time in it and go do something more productive with your time.

Unless, of course, you just want to do some "concern trolling". You know, the "just asking questions" and "just noticing" behavior.

I'll be charitable and presume you are talking in this thread accidentally, and will find your way to more productive activities instead.

Do any of your emails actually make it into an inbox though? I did this for a server and I couldn't even get it to land in spam on gmail.

In email world, this is as far from 'good to go' as you can get. Good luck getting anyone to read your emails this way.

Could you explain to me (non-US and non-EU resident), how people in EU are okay with mandatory photo scanning on your devices(aka CSAM protection)?

Who does this weird proposals like Chat Control?

AFAIK, it is not "alt-right" parties - so it really does not clicking for me, why AfD and others constantly brought in during online privacy discussions?

It's your source, not mine; if you have a better one, post it. I won't do your own research for you.

> Imagine the outrage EU would have had if US seized immigrants jewelry

The US literally deports people to concentration camps in countries with no civil liberties. Many have disappeared there. A whole other group have been raped and become pregnant and are being moved around to force births.

And you are concerned about fucking jewelry. Genuinely, are you taking a piss here?

Per capita vs absolute numbers are not especially relevant in this case. The figures differ by orders of magnitude.

Over the last 100 years, almost certainly not. For the most recent decade? Yes, of course I would expect these statistics to be fairly accurate.

Between 2021 and 2025 (inclusive), Wikipedia lists 68 dead in Germany versus 5882 dead in the US, despite the US only being ~4 times larger. More people have been killed by police in the US this year than in Germany in the past ten years, and it's not even April yet.

Oh come on guys, everyone knows it's the UK

> Funnily, I had friends from Europe participate in the No Kings protest here, while coming from countries that have literal kings.

This is either disingenuous or misunderstands the nature of European constitutional monarchies.

Hungary can send an EIO to France or Germany, and the consistent trend has been to reduce the ability of executing states to review these requests.

Can you quote it? Did not see any of those things you are mentioning.

https://rsf.org/en/country/united-states

Not quibbling but to be fair that report shows problems in Europe too, not the same speed of change, and its a different situation, but if you care about democracy its not great.

"Congress shall make no law...prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

that does not imply one being the subset of the other to me, if anything they are clearly defined and therefore clearly separate.

Trump refuses to answer simple questions and attacks and mocks reporters, that's if they're lucky and he doesn't directly sue them for millions/billions. Hell, the white house banned Associated Press. Is that free speech or freedom of the press?

> yet I think Nazis legally being able to "spout Nazi ideology" is a healthy thing for our society

How did that end last time? We know where it ends, we know there's nothing redeeming. Nobody needs Nazis, there is nothing to be gained by engaging with them or giving them a platform.

Sure that happened :)

Does that football scenario mean that the rule of law doesn't exist or that it does exist and is being enforced?

I agree with you that both of those laws are stupid, but that's a completely separate discussion to what I'm claiming above.

So what? Can you point to a real example where this has been abused or are we discussing hypotheticals?

My fucking god the American exceptionalism arrogance runs strong.

Yes it's always the evil Russians and the stupid people are influenced by TikTok so we need to tell them what they should vote!

From e.g. Wikipedia:

>At the time of his exclusion, Georgescu was leading in public opinion polls

D'oh!

>That was a stupid thing for him to say, but he is a private citizen

How convenient he got fired, everything is good now, surely the Commission does not hold the same views as him! Are you really this naive?

And don't get me wrong, I support neither Georgescu (a typical conspiracy theorist nut) nor AfD (who only argue that the evil immigrants are at fault). But I support a free and democratic process and these are no longer in place. If you ban leading candidates and try to ban political parties that are in the lead (AfD and CDU constantly switch #1 positions in polls by 1-2 percentagep points) just because they are not on "your side" you are not better than any country that you mark as authoritian.

Switzerland - as well as EU based providers - have to comply with court orders. And the EU as well as Switzerland issue court orders upon request from friendly foreign states ("Rechtshilfeersuchen" in german) - such as the US.

Yes but you may need the IPs to warm up and build some reputation, depending where you setup your server the IPs may be burned. Check logs and reputation with some of the postmaster tools the major providers offer and with the services that allow looking up an IP. senderscore used to be convenient to use now it displays a stupid contact form when you try to check an IP, there are others.

To be honest I haven't done the setup for sending a handful of emails but IPs sending hundreds/thousands per day it's fine as long as you don't start spamming people and get flagged.

These are also political decisions and the EU is much more powerful politically than Switzerland so if your adversary is the US and they're willing to use lawfare or more than you should probably go with the EU and not Switzerland. Germany is considered one of the most robust legal systems for privacy.

But there is always risk no matter what you do.

Yes they do. I wouldn't try it from a residential IP but as long as you run a blacklist check on the IP before you start, and configure DNS correctly, it's generally fine.

Don't discount that it could be both. It's still early in some parts of the US, they might not have had their coffee yet.

Sure, those EIO will be held if Hungary starts applying EIO that it got (e.g. for former Ministry of Justice of Poland which awaits trail, he sits comfortably in Hungary).

Let's hope elections there will change Orban into something saner.

Do you run your email server? I run two, have next to no problems (the key is in setting up DNS correctly, as I mentioned) and keep getting told this by people who have never tried.

Can you remind me when those actually passed? I can pull equally up equally ridiculous bills from the US that never came to fruition.

There’s a concerning trend of EIOs issued by Hungary being enforced in France and Germany? What would be an example of this?

Are you sure "the press" doesn't just refer to physical printing presses there?

Yes, it sure did. Read my comment on your original post.

It's fine if you think the American approach to free speech is bad - you don't have to live here - but please justify that rather than just name-calling.

Hitler and his cronies were so surprised that the system he had vowed to destroy let him in.

  > And don't get me wrong, I support neither 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

It is not about who you support and what your favorite color is.

Weimar Germany had laws against hate speech!

Depends on how you interpret the ECHR.

Does it allow blocking half the internet during football games?

It almost certainly does not: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-115705%...

AFAIU this is common because lower courts often deliberately choose to not try to interpret ECHR, leaving that for appeals courts.

You can look at past ECHR decisions for countless cases of abuse by various national governments.

You can look at the history of EAW related litigation also, it'll probably prove most informative. Executing states used to constantly deny requests due to judicial review, rules were clarified to remove the possibility of judicial review by executing states.

Wasn't Proton launched as a "your data is encrypted at rest, we could never access it without your consent"? The implication being that even if they received said court orders, they didn't have anything to give. Am I misremembering that?

I am not saying passing, but seems there is a large group of politicians(supposedly backed by voters?) who lobby such initiatives who are not some alt-right fascist outliers?

(I am not from US, please keep that strawman out)

More elaboration on what’s involved in “correctly” would probably drive the point home — “this works because” vs “works for me.”

This is the best I can give you off the top of my head, but look at which countries are the most active in eurojust :) https://www.eurojust.europa.eu/ar2020/data-annex

An LLM can probably find some better links though.

That they did not apply. They let a guy who tried to overthrow the government free to run for election again. This kind of thing should never be allowed. Someone who physically demonstrates they have no business in a democratic society doesn't belong in it.

They encrypt your data insofar as your email, files, etc. but that doesn't mean they don't have information potentially useful to the authorities. See the recent headline where they revealed a user's payment information allowing them to be identified.

I was expecting you might have a relevant example that applies to this discussion.

I interpret ECHR as what it is: not a regulatory body by any stretch of the imagination. It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so. You seem to be interpreting it as some sort of an equivalent to the US supreme court, which it is not.

But now we're straying even further from my original argument which boils down to "laws mean something" into arguing the intricacies of how laws are supposed to be changed. I'm not interested in having that discussion, as it has nothing to do with my original claim.

I made sure to include the word correctly in the reply. Mox mailserver tells you exactly what to do. I think mailcow does as well. A lot of people don't do it and then tell others that selfhosting email with good deliverability is impossible. You set it up once and you're good to go

I think you might be missing the ‘concerning’ part. Which specific cases are concerning? I don’t find it inherently concerning that people can’t escape justice by crossing the Hungarian border, Bonnie and Clyde style.

Writing "EAW abuse" into google finds endless lawyer marketing posts. The facts of the first one I clicked on sound pretty bad!

https://greatjames.co.uk/martin-henley-secures-the-dismissal...

ECHR decisions are (supposed to be) legally binding. If they're not obeyed, that's not a good look for rule of law in Europe.

ECHR decisions are certainly not mere recommendations.

>It can recommend changes to the national law, but it cannot force any state to do so

ECHR can simply invalidate national law.

Too explicitly spell it out, op is saying here that if any one of the 27 countries in the EU decides you are breaking one of their laws, they can have 1 of the other 26 enforce an EIO.

Oh no, that's totally up to you. If you're happy with the courts in your country not being able to review the requests sent from Hungary, that's cool. Without transparent judicial review, how could we even know if the cases are concerning?

According to whom? You?

The only thing ECHR cares about is one piece of "legislation", which is not a law, but a declaration (Declaration of Human Rights), so that you have some sort of internationally recognised body to go to whenever you feel that your local judicial system has done you injustice. That is all it does. That is all it is meant to do. That is the sole reason of its existence. It is not a legislative body at all.

> ECHR can simply invalidate national law.

It can't. You're either making things up or severely misunderstanding the court. It can say "this law doesn't align with the Declaration" and that's it. The law still exists. ECHR relies on signatories being willing to make the necessary changes themselves. Some are and get right on it, some aren't. The election law in my country has lost 5 cases in the ECHR and not a single one of the verdicts are fixed as of now, the oldest of which dates back to 2009. This is horrible, I want to see them fixed, but ECHR can't force us to fix it and we as in the country face 0 consequences for not addressing any of them (as of yet).

There is a separate court called European Court of Justice which is the equivalent of the US supreme court and is tasked with interpreting EU-wide laws and making sure national laws are aligned as much as possible. That is a legislative body with an enforcement mechanism. ECHR is not, you don't know what you're talking about.

Which would be perfectly fine if your local jurisdiction could still properly review those foreign requests.

EIOs are subject to review by the recipient state. It seems that you can’t point to a single relevant example of a concerning EIO from Hungary.

EIOs are subject to a dual criminality requirement. So it’s not as if arbitrary Hungarian laws can be applied in France via EIOs. And of course, we all know this is not happening, which is why we get radio silence from the people who are ‘concerned’ about this whenever specifics are requested.

"Subject to review" means little more than "is the form filled correctly?", it certainly does not mean second-guessing by the courts in the executing state.

Like, yeah, your EIO will be rejected if you don't tick any of the crime-category boxes in the form.

>EIOs are subject to a dual criminality requirement

Dual criminality requirement only applies to non-Annex D crimes. Which is... not many crimes. You seem awfully confident for someone so ill-informed.

>And of course, we all know this is not happening

How would you know that it isn't happening? EIOs are not public!

Annex D is a list of things that are crimes pretty much everywhere.

Not sure what to make of the claim that Hungary might theoretically be enforcing Hungarian law in France. It seems surprising that no-one has noticed any specific consequences of this that you can point to.

The EIO is mostly just a formalization and standardization of a bunch of ad-hoc processes that were already in place. Law enforcement agencies in different European countries do try to assist each other, on the whole.

What you're missing is the erosion of the ability of the executing states to say things like "hey this is sketchy, we think this crime might not have happened", "hey the police department in this particular city is notoriously untrustworthy", or "hey this prosecutor is widely known in the local press to be corrupt and owns a collection of ferraris".

Now foreign authorities are trusted by default and significant parts of their reasoning are not subject to review, that's bad.

So provide some concrete examples of what you’re talking about, if it’s a real concern.