Being Un-American
This is just a short post to detail some of the actions I’ve taken recently to uncouple my online presence from various US-based service providers or app makers.
Services
- Deleted Notion and installed Obsidian which uses local storage in markdown formatted text files.
- Switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi Search, although I’m torn on this one because Kagi is based in San Francisco.
- Exploring alternatives to Fastmail based either in Canada or in the EU. Still looking for something that will be suitable for my needs.
Social Media
- Deleted Instagram and Threads accounts (x2) and started using Mastodon and also Bluesky with my .ca domain as my handle.
- Deleted my Flickr account.
- X account was deleted a looong time ago.
- Facebook account was deleted a looong time ago.
Other
- Switched from Brave Browser to Vivaldi which is EU-based and not run by a crypto-bro with a history of awful opinions.
- Switched from .com domains to .ca domains for websites and also email.
- Adopted CIRA’s Canadian Shield DNS at the router level.
- Moved DNS for my various sites from Fastmail back to Hover (where I work).