Evert's website

'Deamericanizing' my homelab

Introduction #

Given the state of the world - and specifically of the USA - at the moment, I'm trying to reduce my reliance on American tech (infrastructure, services and tools)1 where possible.

This post is a 'living' list of the services I have and haven't (yet) replaced; I intend to update it every now and then.

Replaced services, tools, infrastructure #

Google Drive/Google Workspace and OneDrive/Microsoft 365 #

I've been subscribed to Office 365 Microsoft 365 Microsoft 365 Copilot for the past few years, as I could get a relatively cheap licence through my employer (40€ per year for 1 TB of storage and five installations of Office). Even before this post I was planning on ditching 365, as the forced inclusion of Copilot increased the renewal price to 70€ and then 100€. I also use Google Drive for some older files, but here too the constant pushing of Gemini is a turn-off.

I've moved most of my data to Proton Drive. As I was already using Proton Mail as my fallback email account, I upgraded my subscription to Unlimited to gain 500 GB of Drive space. The built-in Office applications are fine for basic documents and spreadsheets: existing files do need to be converted to a proprietary format before you can edit them, but can be exported to Office file formats afterwards. I do have some small gripes with Proton's service:

  1. The amount of space included in the Unlimited subscription - for 12,99€ per month I would have liked to see 1 TB instead of 500 GB2. You can only buy additional space by upgrading your subscription, which also includes other functionality you may not need (in my case the next tier would be 19,99€ for Duo, which includes 2 TB of storage, but also an additional user, extra email addresses and calendar functionality I do not need).
  2. There is still no Linux app for Drive. They've been talking about it since 2023 and recently mentioned it should come out this year (2026), but seeing is believing.

I'm also trialling an OpenCloud deployment on my homelab. While I've run OwnCloud and Nextcloud before, this is the first self-hosted tool that feels robust enough to trust with my files. Combined with Collabora CODE this seems like a great self-hosted alternative to Proton Drive, as CODE is based on LibreOffice and can thus directly edit the common Office file formats. However, due to some bugs with Collabora on high-DPI systems, Proton is my primary storage service for now.

Cloudflare #

I used three of Cloudflare's services:

Notion and iCloud Notes #

I like having my notes available from anywhere and without installing a client, so tools like Obsidian won't do. I've settled on Outline: it is web-based, self-hostable and has a feature set that is largely comparable to Notion.

Outline doesn't support regular email/password authentication, but instead requires you to configure an external authentication provider. Supported options include Google, Microsoft Entra, Slack, GitLab and Discord, but these are all American services, which is contrary to the point of this post 😄. I instead opted for OIDC via Authelia. This was a bit of extra work to setup, but allows me to reuse Authelia for other services (OpenCloud) and - in combination with Caddy - as an additional security layer for services without 2FA.

iCloud Calendar and iCloud Reminders #

I've migrated both of these to Radicale. Apple's Calendar app offers an export option to an .ics file, which can be imported into Radicale. I migrated Reminders manually as I had only a few items in there. There are two small frustrations with the Apple Calendar and Reminders clients:

  1. The Radicale URL, username and password need to be entered on each device separately - fortunately a single account covers both Calendar and Reminders synchronisation.
  2. Reminders occasionally asks if I want to re-enable iCloud to 'keep my reminders synced between devices'.

GitHub (private repositories) #

A while ago I already moved my private projects from GitHub to Gitea, which I've since migrated to Forgejo. The user interface is way faster, my instance has a much better uptime, and no LLMs are trained on my data and interactions.

Backblaze B2 #

I've used Backblaze B2 for a few years as the backend for my backups using Restic. Restic supports arbitrary object storage providers via S3, so apart from needing to do a full sync once, migrating to another provider is trivial. I've settled on OVHcloud object storage. Normally I'd prefer Hetzner (their products are excellent, while the OVHcloud interface is a bit slow), but their object storage pricing starts at a minimum of 1 TB, while my total backup volume is currently lower than that.

Cloudflare DNS/Google DNS #

I use multiple PiHole instances to block ads, trackers and malicious domains. I've switched the upstream provider of these instances from Cloudflare and Google to the unfiltered servers provided by Quad9 (Swiss), DNS.SB (German) and DNS4EU (Czech).

iCloud Books #

I have a small collection of EPUB and PDF files, which was stored in iCloud before. I've moved these books to an Audiobookshelf instance instead. I'm still looking for a nice iPad client to read them on the go.

Let's Encrypt #

Actalis is based in Italy and offers unlimited free SSL certificates via ACME. The only catch compared to Let's Encrypt is that you need to create an account to be able to access their ACME endpoint. As I'd set up Caddy before, switching to Actalis for certificates was relatively painless.

Not yet replaced #

iCloud Photos #

I set up Immich a while ago. It currently stores about 100 GB of old family photos. This works fine, but I'm not sure if I trust the synchronisation feature enough to migrate all my photos from iCloud.

LLMs #

The frontier models (GPT, Claude, Gemini) are obviously all developed by American companies. I do not use LLMs that much, so I'm trying out different models every month or two to see which one is the most useful to me. This includes open models like Qwen, Kimi, Mistral and Gemma either through OpenRouter3 or locally on my Mac.

iCloud Mail #

I'll be honest: I really like the automatic integration with the iOS and macOS Mail apps here. In a pinch I could switch my primary email to Proton too though.

Tailscale #

I use Tailscale extensively as the networking fabric between my devices and servers. This is fine for now, as it is a Canadian, not an American, company.

Headscale is an open-source reimplementation of the Tailscale control server, but as it is used with the regular Tailscale apps - which are closed source - switching doesn't win me a lot. Plain WireGuard is another option, but is a pain to set up for some 30 machines I have connected to Tailscale currently.

Bitwarden #

Vaultwarden is my password manager of choice. It is open source and has been audited before. It is used in conjunction with the Bitwarden apps. While these are also open source, they are developed by an American company, and there is no way to verify that the binaries installed through the iOS App Store are not modified in any way.

GitHub (public repositories) #

While I do not have a lot of public repositories up currently, you can't really avoid GitHub: the discoverability is simply unmatched. I hope with the recent developments around data harvesting for LLM training more people move to Codeberg. Maybe in a few years that will then be the premier open-source Git platform.

GitHub Container Registry/Docker Hub #

Almost all of my containers are pulled from either GHCR or Docker Hub, both owned by American companies. As far as I know there is currently no large European registry available.

Remarks #

1: Open-source software from developers based in the USA is, of course, acceptable: worst case a fork can be done to continue development from the EU or by an unaffiliated party. See for example the recent fork of OnlyOffice by an EU entity.

2: While with Proton you of course pay a little extra for privacy, the gap in €/GB is too large in my opinion: Microsoft offers 1 TB for 10€ and includes the Office license as mentioned earlier, while Google offers 5 TB(!) and extensive access to Gemini and their other LLM tools for 22€.

3: OpenRouter is unfortunately also US-based. While a few EU-based routing platforms do exist, they are still relatively new and haven't yet established a proven track record. Requesty seems to be in the lead as they raised an investment of 3 million dollars last year.