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Bye Bye Big Tech: How I Migrated to an almost All-EU Stack (and saved 500€ per year)
(www.zeitgeistofbytes.com)
Hosted on substack 😂
this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2026
303 points (96.0% liked)
Technology
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Seriously how damn hard is it for an IT enthusiast to host their own blog.
Many do but it’s a nightmare for SEO. When people use Substack or Medium it’s because they have built in social network that allows strangers to easily find your blog. Sadly independent blogs don’t really make money unless you are already famous with a network to follow you.
It would be cool to make some kind of open source components you add to a blog to suggest other blogs you might be interested in. If you use it on your site you would show up on other peoples blogs. There could be tags or something to keep the content relevant.
I wonder if anything like that exists. Probably too easy to abuse
This is what Bluesky does but we should take that idea and do that ourselves as well for not just a Substack decentralized alternative but also for Amazon, and Facebook decentralized alternatives as well
Sounds like web rings in the late 90s
I've seen webrings being used in some still active blogs, I just don't remember which ones
You simply can’t get around LinkedIn, GitHub, YouTube, Medium, Substack and so on if you want to stay connected.
“Can’t”. 🤦♂️
LinkedIn connects you with fuck all. It's all just LLM posts on there, it's ridiculous.
At some point you have to ask who you are staying connected to
Unless of course your content is original and you want to foster the alternatives instead of further cementing the problematic platforms.
Sure, the choice is rather ideological than economical, but not working on the transition (like using all platforms in parallel in order to someday fade away from the problematic ones) is just lazy and half arsed.
And they cite Vivaldi as their go-to browser. European, sure, but not open source and based on Chromium. I'm always skeptical of Vivaldi users; they seem to value nostalgia (remember Opera?) over facts.
Some of us are pretty ok.
Man I just love the browser and its features. But it does help that they are EU based and have some pretty well known browser veterans as founders. Also they are quite supportive in their forums and I feel they try to be as transparent as possible in their blog posts. E.g. they made clear to support Manifest V2 as long as it is somehow possible while also keep on improving their builtin ad blocker (but we all know nothing can keep up with uBlock)
EU regions is also becoming a privacy nightmare with the EU commission's general war on encryption in the name of "safety".
EU is waging war on encryption? Are you taking about Chat Control 2.0 that specifically says encryption cannot be weakened in any way?
You're seeing that because it's above the table. I think other large countries are simply doing it under the table. I think the NSA/CIA basically own Microsoft and Google encryption whenever they want.
A good rule is: If you don't want it read, don't store it on someone else's servers with someone else's encryption keys.
Generally speaking, Microsoft and Google don't have encryption in the Privacy sense, only in the security sense. They hold the keys, and are therefore happy to have anything over that's requested. No need to break any encryption.
We know about the NSA backdoor into every is tech company. We should assume the eu has the same deals in place.
How did the EU manage to keep their back doors secret where the USA didn't?
you are right of course. But US surveillance has been public knowledge before snowden and even the big shock then wasn't that they were mass spying everyone, it was that they were spying US citizens as well which was supposed to be illegal. So legality doesn't even matter. They will find their loopholes anyway. It's the intent of the council and the bureaucracy for more control that worries me.
Im the owner of a small startup and I am working only with Linux and Nextcloud (and so are my 4 employees) - it's doable and it's a great feeling!
How do you handle email?
We have our own mailserver hosted with our provider.
Blogging, Newsletter & Co.: Well, as you can see, I’m writing on Substack. There are no alternatives except to host it entirely yourself, but that doesn’t make sense to me right now.
Let me introduce you to bear blog: https://bearblog.dev/
I don't yet use it, but I read a few of the blogs. Very RSS feed reader friendly and it's simple without excess crap.
