Ask HN: How would you decouple from the US?

38•yawa_me_worht•1mo ago

Dear Americans, please don’t take this the wrong way - I love the US, have friends there, and treasure memories I made there.

However, it seems plausible that the US is turning into a rogue, authoritarian, Russia-like state increasingly more friendly towards Russia and hostile towards Europe. I am a European who grew up in a country still occupied by Russia. I am increasingly more worried about building my projects on American platforms, using an American operating system, etc.

What if the US actually attacks Greenland or finds another way to be openly hostile to Europe? I am not saying it will happen. All I am saying is that it seems prudent to prepare. How would you do it?

It is currently impossible to unhook myself from the US, but I would like to minimize exposure.

I can’t do anything about things like building an alternative to VISA/MasterCard (except wait for the digital Euro), so I will focus on things I can actually do and ignore things like my government buying F-35s and possibly giving my health data to Palantir.

* Mobile phone - there are no real European alternatives; it’s just Apple vs Google. Samsung or HTC with Android seems like a less bad option.

* Operating system - I have been using Linux for ages, getting rid of Windows seems relatively easy.

* Social networks - I grew to hate them before the current US admin, never used TikTok or Instagram, and I mostly stopped using Facebook and Twitter around the time Musk bought Twitter.

* Stripe for payments - this will be hard, but I am experimenting with our local payment processor, and so far it seems surprisingly doable, but it is not a battle-tested solution like Stripe.

* Clerk authentication - doable, but a lot of work and worrying

* AWS - I had a surprisingly bad experience with AWS and switched to a local provider with a lot less functionality (that I mostly do not need) and a lot better support

* GitHub, Cloudflare... dear God, how could we Europeans allow ourselves to be that dependent on anyone? Everything I touch is American.

* Gmail - this will be hard (two decades of emails). Any advice?

* Anything AI-related - fuuu, I am lost here.

What am I missing/forgetting? What do/would you do in my place?

I really hope you will take this as a brainstorming exercise and not an attack on America. I really do love the US and hope its democracy turns out to be more resilient than it currently seems.

EDIT: Please kindly keep responses practical. Let’s not turn this into a political discussion. You might approach it as a “what if” exercise, even if you think what the current US admin is doing is great, Europeans deserve what they get, etc.

Comments

DamonHD•1mo ago

I am also reducing my reliance on the US a little, financially also.

Technically:

Have you looked at Fairphone? I've been using a couple lastig many many years now.

I self-host email, DNS, and a few other few services.

Do not use any part of Meta, and moved from Twitter to Mastodon/Fediverse, at least in part hosted in the EU.

yawa_me_worht•1mo ago

Thank you, I did not know about Fairphone - I will give it a closer look. It looks interesting.

Honestly, sel-hosting email, DNS, etc. seems perhaps too “advanced” for me - I am not sure I would be able to do it without causing more problems than I solve.

I am resigned to the fact that I cannot be completely independent, protected from surveillance by any state, etc. At this point, I am just looking for ways to prevent catastrophic scenarios, such as Trump blocking (or threatening to block) Europeans' access to American clouds and the like.

elbci•1mo ago

> "How would you decouple from the US?"

Depends who's "you": if you are China you just stop answering the US calls, if you are EU you print out "Subsistence agriculture" from wikipedia ;)

And about "What do/would you do in my place?" - I would take a second look at those sometimes ~50% East Europeans that keep popping up in opinion pools saying the Russian occupation was better that EU - maybe they are not just crazy as the MSM paints them to be ;)

PS Linux is also US with over 95% of merges from corporations

FlxMgdnz•1mo ago

For user authentication there is at least one European alternative to Clerk, and that’s Hanko (I am the founder).

Granted, Hanko Cloud is still running on AWS (Frankfurt), but we’re working on alternative EU data location options right now.

lawn•1mo ago

> Gmail - this will be hard (two decades of emails). Any advice?

Proton Mail or Fastmail.

Do yourself a favor and setup an email address on a domain you own, so it's easier to switch providers if you need to.

microtonal•4w ago

I have used Fastmail for well over a decade, but I am planning to move away. Even though they are an aussie company, their main servers are in the US (Philly IIRC). I'll probably switch to Proton, since we also recently moved our family cloud storage there.

atmosx•4w ago

Fastmail is an Australian company. Their privacy laws are very poor. Fastmail servers are hosted in the US. Of course Fastmail doesn’t data mine email to create profiles and use for ads targeting and/or other purposes.

However in this context European based email providers would be a better fit.

Rounin•4w ago

There are a couple of subreddits related to this. Perhaps you will find them useful: https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyFromEU/ https://old.reddit.com/r/degoogle/

perilunar•4w ago

For social there's Mastadon. Plenty of EU servers.

zz5759•4w ago

I’d frame this less as “decoupling from the US” and more as general risk diversification.

Single-vendor and single-jurisdiction dependencies are fragile regardless of politics. Designing systems that can move providers, jurisdictions, or currencies with limited friction seems like the only practical approach.

journal•4w ago

I'm taking it the wrong way. You are misunderstanding and misrepresenting the situation involving geopolitics in this. There's absolutely nothing you can do to any significant degree unless you can get enough people you communicate with to agree to communicate differently. All we need is text, images, and video. No one cares if you use Helvetica or Times New Roman. No significant progress will happen until those high speed undersea cables are sabotaged to blind us from what will happen next. That's when s will start happening and you'll have better options because everyone will be inventing the next best thing like mesh networks and ways to transport large amounts data physically. We're about to go from gigabytes to megabytes of usage, rapidly. Add some power outages and you will have some nice and creative options of communication, storage, and compute. Latency will suck but you'll be able to send a message from Kansas City to North Korea in less than 50 years and there is nothing any can do to stop that. Countries will begin to use nukes to control their population. By the time you "decouple" US won't even look the way it does now. We're about to shift borders north through give some lose some diplomacy. Everyone is waiting because no one wants to invest in the south if it's gonna break off anyway and now you have complicated logistics. US itself will begin to be strip mined in under 100 years as intelligent populations depart the continent to make money rebuilding Europe and Russia.

mitchbob•4w ago

Significant progress is already happening, and it's been amply documented on HN. The most visible changes have been European government agencies dumping Microsoft products in favor of open-source alternatives and replacing US-based cloud providers with providers in the EU, but those are just the beginnings. Progress can - and will - be incremental, but it will be profound. The US is now a rogue state that can no longer be trusted, and countries everywhere will do what they need to to protect themselves.

tacostakohashi•4w ago

You seem to be in Europe. The problem you'll find is that Europe is composed, to a greater or lesser extent, of US proxy/vassal states. This is for historical reasons, WWII, Marshall Plan, Lend-Lease, NATO, Bretton Woods, IMF, "rules-based order", etc., etc.

There is really no point in worrying about personal independence for smart phones, github hosting and operating systems if the state itself is not independent and self-sufficient.

atmosx•4w ago

You ought to start from someplace though.

taurath•4w ago

Acceptance of what we personally have control over is one of the best places to start.

atmosx•4w ago

I am using the mistral API for personal projects through vim-ai and liteLLM.

I must say that so far I don’t miss ChatGPT or Gemini (which I use at work).

al_borland•4w ago

GitHub seems like an easy one, as you don’t really need a 3rd party for this.

Bitbucket is also an option, as Atlassian has a headquarters in Australia (but also one in San Francisco).

But ultimately, if things break down to the point where you lose access to the Visa network, you have bigger problems. I don’t expect that to happen, and suspect the news you’re receiving is catastrophizing things.

OrionNox•4w ago

This guy is ngmi

amadeuswoo•3w ago

For mobile phones: Chinese brands (Xiaomi, OnePlus, Oppo) are worth considering. Comparable specs to flagships at half the price, and you're trading one form of data exposure for another rather than adding to it. Not "better" from a privacy standpoint, but meets the "not American" criterion and doesn't lock you into an ecosystem.

atleastoptimal•3w ago

The US's entire economy depends on tech. They won't do anything that would compromise the integrity and viability of the international tech industrial complex.

In the US you also are not arrested for social media posts like you are in the UK or other parts of Europe.

aosaigh•3w ago

At the moment, you can’t GET INTO the US if you have a social media post that even criticises the administration. Is that the “free speech” people in the US are so obsessed with?

kal247•3w ago

Some suggestions here : https://european-alternatives.eu/

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Ask HN: How would you decouple from the US?

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