For me personally, I had to install the "Go European" browser extension [1] before I actually started switching, due to more frequent reminders, from using mostly chatGPT/claude to LeChat by mistral (which feels at least as good).
My Take-away: User stickiness is hard to break due to providers' walled gardens, even for me who is aware and willing to change.
But in the past two weeks, I've done the things I've previously put off because they require real work. I've set up a NAS and switched all of the remaining things. I'm now using Immich for photo hosting, Vaultwarden for passwords, Hoarder for bookmarking, and a self-hosted Standard Notes instance for note-taking, to-do lists, and saving articles for later reading.
I'm super happy with this setup. Immich, in particular, is absolutely fantastic; its default face recognition model works better than Google Photos, at least for me. Once you've set it up, you can log your family into the same NAS and have them use it, too.
It looks like they're planning to build a European index with Qwant [2], but their help pages still say they're on Bing and Google so I guess nothing materialized yet.
[1]: https://ecosia.helpscoutdocs.com/article/579-search-results-...
The results are interesting, they aren't bad, just different. Localized search isn't great, but it might be perfectly fine if you're in the UK.
On the minus side, the way their email is set up means you can't easily use third-party email clients without using an intermediary tool (Proton Mail Bridge), and because email is encrypted at rest, their own email search is abysmal.
Just a note for anyone looking for alternative password managers - 1Password is Canadian!
no matter who is hosting your email (megacorp, a hn darling, your hosting provider, yourself) you get to keep your email addresses. this also means one of the primary means of authenticating you online is not kept hostage by any business.
even for free email services that don't support custom domains, you can likely set up mail forwarding for free or very cheap with your domain hoster, and set up 'send as' alias in your inbox.
4 months on, I'm still type twitter[.]com and finding myself on localhost.
However, I just replicated the most obscure search request that I can remember, an extremely obscure automotive request for help - and, in one go, the DDG result actually got to exactly the end result it had taken me ages to Google.
I'll give DDG another shot.
On the other hand, I am mostly involved in startups where lots of tech choices need to be made from scratch. The startup I'm currently working for doesn't even consider US based tech solutions at the moment. And I think more startups that pop up nowadays will think twice before choosing non-EU based tech.
So that in the long term, we preserve viable alternatives, exactly for times like these where we cannot trust the US govt