I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year | Hacker News Reader

I migrated to an almost all-EU stack and saved 500€ per year

zeitgeistofbytes.com

374 pointsalexcos261 comments

Just migrated away my personal email (with custom domains) from Microsoft 365 to Proton, and boy, it is such a better experience.

M365 has become an intangible mess of a multitude of different admin dashboards redirecting you around and complicating things beyond comprehension. For the migration, I wanted to backup my entire email backlog. It took me two hours to finally get it connected to thunderbard via IMAP and do the backup. I was redirected from Docs pages to the M365 dashboard, M365 Exchange dashboard, Security dashboard and whatnot. I had to turn on 2FA which only worked afer enabling some hidden "Security defaults" until I finally could enable IMAP login, and then took several AI assisted attempt to get the server and credential details.

When I cancelled my subscription MS asks you to give a reason, and the first bullet point is "This product is too complicated to manage" - so they even know about the mess they created.

For now, Proton replaced my M365 subscription, bitwarden, and Kagi (I use protons LUMO AI, which uses different models in the backend and gives you unlimited requests). I didn't have a VPN plan before, now it is also included. The value proposition of Proton is unbeatable in itself, the privacy on top is just the icing on the cake.

MSFT is absolutely screwed, they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365) through a combination of hiring subpar cheap devs and AI code slop, and their big strategic money squeeze bet on AI is about to be severely undercut by the market. There is very little of actual value left in the company, they're only held in place by the OS monopoly.

Whatever nostalgic love there has been for the company from the olden days has completely evaporated by now. It will take a decade for the OS competitor to emerge but once that happens, MSFT will hopefully die in the fiery blaze of death it completely deserves at this point.

This opinion comes fresh off of having to had to engage with their partner center "experience", where basic UI functions are broken beyond repair and simple form submissions have to go through three layers of subcontracted customer "support" which is best described as a broken telephone where you have to explain the problem repeatedly to an endless stack of support staff.

Not to mention Windows 11 BSODing every week and failing to make basic functions like bluetooth work on it.

This may seem dramatic but its an 100% true and accurate representation of how everything works with them these days.

WPS office + HarmonyOS will likely become dominant

my experience of asian software development is they simply build enterprise for the users, how the users want it. rather than trying to shape consumer behaviour. in some ways it could be argued that it is less innovative, but when big orgs figure out a USD$500 laptop running WPS+Harmony + email client can replace msft enterprise contracts a lot of asia co's will never go back

culturally homogenous dev teams producing software for a culturally homogenous market is quite powerful. then outsiders will adapt. rather than winslop focus on support everything, localise to every market, hardware, whatever

i see future of:

HarmonyOS or MacOS for corps then misc tablet systems

this will acelerate with hardware shortages making unified OS+hardware product like huawei or macbook more competitive

Absolutely screwed! Every single product they have - OS (dominant desktop and laptop OS by a wide margin), Azure - (gaining in second place, now 25% vs AWS 31%), M365 (also dominant, particularly in terms of revenue). None of these show any sign of going anywhere, and if anything, the numbers for cloud and M365 are trending up.

I could only wish my own business were this screwed.

Their success is a big part of why the experience is so bad as they have to appeal to a common denominator.

At the same time, they also win on the little things that diehard opponents choose to ignore, like search that kind of works. I don't like Office 365 but I'm a paying customer because, after long research, I haven't found a competitor that meets all my requirements.

> MSFT is absolutely screwed

Probably

> they have ruined every single product they have (OS, Azure, M365)

You forgot Github, the once-reliable and once-generally-fast but now pink-unicorn-bedraggled slow-as-molasses 'forge' site. Oh how they messed it up and am I ever glad I only ever used it as a mirror for my own repos.

How they manage to screw up just about every product they purchase remains a mystery to me but by ${deity} are they good at it.

I agree with everything, just want to add a downside of proton which is often forgotten: there is no search. You cannot search your emails’ body (headers work, but keywords like “from:” still do not work for search), you cannot search the content of your files, etc.

It’s the price of end-to-end encryption.

The only workaround is synchronising everything locally and searching locally.

But you still can use Thunderbird for that. I recommend it no matter what mail provider is used. Web interfaces are so heavy nowadays, compared to that, Thunderbird feels so fast.

Until some time ago they prevented users from using Thunderbird for Protonmail though. Well, good that now it is possible!

You've been able to use it since 2017 on Windows and 2020 on Linux, so only about 8 and 5 years respectively.

yes, so I can search my emails solely on my laptop if I install proton bridge and synchronize 50GB of emails. And in case you have ever tried to search 50GB of data with thunderbird, it’s slow.

I tried synchronising the data directly in the browser, without any email client and the search is mediocre and slow.

This is not a great experience for search.

But again, it’s not a critique of Proton, it’s just how it is with E2EE. At least it demonstrate they are really doing E2EE.

I still hope some time in the future homomorphic encryption will help, but I think we are at least a decade away from that.

This is a problem of encrypted storage in general (and hopefully homomorphic encryption will solve that), but I knew this and for me that is a feature, not a bug. I use 2-step password auth (NOT 2FA) explicitly so no one can read my emails without my consent - not the provider, nor the government.

Can you elaborate on how the second password improves the privacy/security posture? I might switch to it.

I am assuming that the second password is like decryption key. I have saved the second password as "mailbox password"

The way I interpreted is that first password is for the account, so verify I am who I say I am. But since the emails are encrypted, browser can't show my messages in human-readable form. Second/mailbox password decrypts it and shows the emails in human readable format.

This is just a guess.

I would love to hear about second password from other/more knowlegeable folks.

ah, ok, but that’s not what this is for.

Proton does not have access to your email contents, no matter if you use one or two passwords. They do not have you password, neither the first one, nor the second one, they have a hash of it, to be able to verify you have types the correct password. Only the actual password (the first one or the second one) can decrypt email content. Decryption only happens in the browser (Or in the proton app).

Of course you need to trust them on this, it’s difficult to verify, but it as been audited multiple times.

The second password is an old vestige of the time where they couldn’t manage to use a single password for both authentication and decryption.

I use the second one as well, but I use it so I can use VPN on some common devices the family use as well, without having to enter the second password. So if the family device is lost or compromised, only my first proton password has ever been used on it.

Does anyone know if the android app for ProtonMail works now? It became unusable a couple of years ago

I've had no issues with the app lately, but it's still missing the feature of building a local search index to do searches based on e-mail content, like the web client can do.

Have you seen any difference in email reception rates from Proton?

Too early to say that (I used the holidays for the transition). With your custom domains you have to make sure everything is setup properly on the DNS side (MX records, SPF, DKIM/DMARC etc.) but the proton ui has checks and makes that really easy, when correctly setup all checks are displayed "green". If you have trouble of your outgoing mails to be accepted (or land in spam), I would advice making sure all is marked green for you too.

To add to my own post what made me switch from M365 away in the first place besides the admin madness:

- No catch-all (yes, I use my own domain just for me, and I want a catchall to my mailbox)

- Outlook 365 webinterface becoming buggy and shitty in so many ways

- I had 2 domains set up (one private, one business) but O365 would not display which email a given was used as target (just display my name), nor would it let me choose FROM which Email I want send/reply to a mail

- O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so, but I always keep the webinterface open in my tab 24/7

Additionally, I had a Bitwarden paid subscription and looking for another VPN subscription, plus a commercial AI subscription. Proton is has all of that in a one-package deal.

1. That's one mail flow rule.

2. Agreed

3. Yes, inbox rules could color these

4. Something must wrong in CA, this should not happen (if you don't want it to)

I have faced "O365 required re-authentication every 24h or so" in my previous job.

It was irritating.

I just assumed it was "IT policy" and accepted the inconvinience.

I really tried migrating to Proton, but unfortunately I found their suite not really fit for purpose and I had to request a refund.

- No search in Mail. You can use Bridge to pull your emails into something else, but this means it's no longer secure, and not really feasible for a non-techy partner!

- No search in Drive

- 3 domain limit for Mail(???)

- Drive sucks. No previewing files, viewing photos etc. due to missing docs suite

- No proper shared folders in Drive

- Pass is woeful at autocomplete

- Pass Aliases are independent of logins, so you end up with double entries for everything

- You can't sync the calendar with native apps, and the calendar doesn't show birthdays

- No contact sync

- Pass doesn't support SSH

- VPN lets you split tunnel by app on PC, app AND IP on Android, IP on the chrome extension. Some let you include, others exlcude. How hard is it to just allow exclude/include for hostnames?

There's tonnes more that I'm missing that I can't think of from the top of my head, but it seems like Proton have stretched themselves very thinly. What I would consider a lot of basic features are missing. One look at their UserVoice community shows a lot of frustration

I think it's probably best to pay for individual services that focus on one area. I ended up with Fastmail, 1Password, and Windscribe for example.

Valid points. For me the no search is feature (due to everything being encrypted), not a bug. But this is an individual decision. I have a similar list after 2 years of using (and managing) my personal M365 subscription (Onedrive on macOS sucks, search on iOS is very slow, spotlight integration doesn't work etc.). I just wonder what you use now as an alternative, because it seems the perfect solution will not exist. For M365, they also just price hiked my subscription after one year to over 40% (and what would I do, migration takes day) and I just felt Microsoft holds me hostage. This is not solved in any way by moving to just another lock-in platform, but I trust proton more to value customers and not squeeze money out of me with that lock-in. At least I trust them more than Microsoft or Google.

Unfortunately we took the simple option and reverted back to Google. I was lucky that my wife even went along with my plan to migrate everything in the first place!

I'm considering self-hosting Immich to replace photos, but not sure when I'll tackle that and don't fancy having to use Tailscale all the time. No idea about a Drive replacement as yet!

E2EE is definitely nice, however if you communicate with many people using other email providers your emails still end up there unencrypted

Can't create mailing lists/groups.

Wow, no search is a deal breaker. Might as well just delete my email, that's pretty secure.

How would you search email on an E2EE server without pulling them local?

I don't like the idea of moving from google's ecosystem to proton. While they're better, ecosystems tend to get locked down or change for the worse.I'm not planning to repeat the google cycle. I got my own domain for email, bitwarden for passwords, firefox forks for browsing, and many other stuff to get off google. Also I realised that stuff like contacts, notes, calendar don't really need to be on the cloud, but I'm planning to self host some services like that, mostly for the nerd in me.

Well WebDav/CalDav/CardDav works quite OK. Baïkal is trivial to selfhost (cal+card) then you just pick some webdav implementation like KaraDav/PicoDav/FlyDav and you are good.

Email is really the one that requires lot of caring about so not easy to self host.

You can self host email in an afternoon, its not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

It's not about configuration but rather your IP reputation and the struggle to not have your mail go straight to addressee's spam folder.

Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP and setting up DMARC and DKIM.

I see this reasoning as the #1 reason not to self host, but it really isn't a big issue once you do the initial setup.

> Thats just a matter of buying a decent IP

Please expand on this. Public cloud IPs would be on spam lists, and providers like Hetzner and OVH aren’t any better. Where does one go to buy a decent IP?

Use an IP reputation tool like https://mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx

What you will find is that many dedicated IP's from larger vendors are fine.

I personally use Hetzner and don't have any issues with reputation at all.

I had troubles with Apple blocking a bunch of range IPs from OVH, because they don’t handle abuse claims. It didn’t show up in blocklists at the time, but was in practice unusable.

IME anything that can be purchased by an average developer is in some list nowadays and deliverability is always crap (with luck it lands on spam folder).

IMHO the problem starts when you need to share your calendar with the outside, then you need to expose that service to the Internet and, to me, it's a whole different level of complexity making sure it remains safe.

If read only is good enough, a simple export of the .ics to a bucket can suffice.

Yes I'm aware, what I'm saying is, in the time between setting up my home server again, I've realised it's not even that useful. I used to think that having my todo and calendar locally on my phone was unusable.

We should all have e-mail backups regardless of which service we are on. Even Google shuts down accounts randomly. Owning your domain and having e-mail backups makes it easy to switch e-mail services.

Owning your domain just changes your point of failure from Google to your registrar. It is not, in fact, any safer.

It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.

It's easier to keep track of your own IP addresses than whatever you'd hosts or DNS hack to over at Google.

But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.

It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.

It's always a varying grade, not either/or.

The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.

Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.

If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.

Yes, I've started to think about this more seriously now in the UK. I have moderate political opinions, but I now ask myself will they be acceptable now or in the near future by the UK government or where my data is hosted (i.e. the US). Will I suddenly have an email account blocked or closed down for supporting a non-violent cause I believe in?

Horrible times when this has started to become a part of my thought process.

Your registrar won't use automated tools to suddenly close your account. They have no reason to look at anything you're doing and most likely won't care as long as you pay your bills and they can pay theirs.

Google knows what you watch and post on Youtube, your emails, your google drive contents, your photos, contacts and everything. Any bit of that can trigger an automated ban for your account you can't recover from unless you know a Googler personally or can get through to their only working customer service outlet: the front page of HN.

True, just happened to one of my friend. 10 years old gmail account got suspended because he supposedly sent phishing emails. Which is completely false (he didn’t even understood what pishing was, he had google authenticator for totp). Ofcourse the appeal process was useless as no one reply to those. It’s been 2 months now. Own your domain.

  > I got my own domain for email

Doesn't this make migrating easier? Since you are just changing where it directs to?

Edit: s/mining/migrating

Mining?

lol thanks for the catch. Meant migrating

I also agree on "for personal things we don't need SaaS" and I would say do we even needs self hosted in the sense of a central server.

By that I mean, could we have like for firefox , heavy clients but with client to client sync. The goal is to not need to have a always online machine while still solving the "i prefer if my emails are copied both on my laptop and my phones" . Especially as nearly all my devices are often if not always on the same LAN

Perhaps you might like syncthing?

Yes what would be better is a "libsyntching" that i can plug to a software so that it does not require additional brain power, i.e install Note app on device A and B, pair them once, fire and forget.

This year I moved off LastPass, and started using [Syncthing](https://syncthing.net/) to sync my [KeepassXC](https://keepassxc.org/). It works pretty well, but doesn't have any automatic conflict resolution (I've been working on [something](https://github.com/LightAndLight/syncthing-merge) for this).

Next up I'm moving my TODOs off Todoist to something local-first, and plugging that into my Syncthing setup.

Firefox sync clearly requires a central server. For any kind of peer to peer syncing to work you must have the machines on at the same time and accessible. And then there is the issue of NATs, including CGNATs. To work reliably these almost always have to have some kind of relays anyway (Tailscale's DERP, Syncthing also has relays).

For the experience an average consumer expects, you at a minimum need a central short-lived cache.

Yes sorry I meant firefox not for the way its sync , but in the way its a heavy client you install. As said for me most of my devices will be at some times during the week in the same nat so that no centralized server even short lived should be needed. And for personnal use, I only care if the device I have on me is the one with latest data especially as for most use case I'm the only one reading/ writing , so eventually consistency is not an issue

I agree that Google (and in the above comment MS) failed to fulfill their lofty promises (“don’t be evil” etc.)

But the blame is on us: we should have known better than to entrust our data to free services run by a company whose entire revenue comes from ads.

Proton is funded by our subscription payments. I think there’s reasonable hope that their incentives will remained aligned with those of their paying users.

Google has very good PR, people still can't grasp that they're an ad company that dabbles in hardware and services.

With proton, at least, you can just use your own domain and if they ever get bad, you just point the MX record to some other service, or self host, and pretty much have it taken care of.

It's a non profit so I think the risk of change for the worse is little.

I’m heavily invested in the Google ecosystem and nothing would make me happier than switching to a privacy-focused European alternative.

However, the value of the Google Workspace* mid-tier (approx. 15€) is hard to beat, I think.

I get:

- granular domain \ email controls (blocklists, routing rules, etc.)

- 2tb of google drive space

- and now Gemini, which is quite nice

It’s 2025, and I’m still finding it impossible to leave :(

* note: I use Google Workspace as a personal account, with just one (my) user, because that gives me access to the domain and management tools listed above

It’s far from impossible, you just have to prioritize your privacy at more than a few bucks a month.

Or in this case have a look at the Google Graveyard and/or those many stories of users that lost access to their Google account without any way to contact an actual person that could help them.

If it was just privacy it would be an easy sell but there is nothing close to a fully functional alternative then Microsoft.

Nothing would make parent happier, but they've placed a very small price on their happiness.

I think this is a very privileged statement when looking at affordability of many countries. For example 40 euros a month is out of reach for much of Albania.

Infomanikak “kSuite bussiness” plan 79eur year. 5 email adresses. 3TB drive (their kDrive is legit better than google drive). WebDav/CardDav/CalDav. Their kMeet conferencing is solid.

Recently they got some Euria AI - i havent tried it i bet it's bad. Rest though i really like.

I don't want to be _that_ guy pushing Infomaniak on each thread about email, but, yeah, it allowed me to get out of Google (with Kagi) with quite a lot of success.

Regarding Euria, I don't use it much since I have Kagi Assistant and other things via work, but I was quite surprised by the results given its cost.

The only annoying thing I saw was that it kept answering in French even though I prompted in English.

I really want to get my entire company out of Google and into Infomaniak but persuading anyone to use their docs suite is going to be impossible, it's awful.

Maybe nextcloud workspace, perhaps with Onlyoffice plug in? Iirc you can get managed nextcloud from ionos

We used to have a self-hosted Nextcloud and everyone hated the docs in it. We're a design company, with everyone on Macs, so something this ugly, clunky and hard to use [0] is never going to get traction.

[0] https://nextcloud.com/c/uploads/2025/09/Nextcloud-Hub-25-Aut...

Ok but that clearly competes with microsoft Office. I would assume majority of office users prefer that look and feature set.

Even google docs are not really pretty. Maybe it's opportunity to get something like Craft, Outline or Notion and thus leaving that docs requirement as part of the suite.

That's what infomaniak already does. Their “suite” is fors class support of OnlyOffice WebDav.

They don't have anything of their own right? They just support Only Office through WebDav. That's like what Nextcloud does.

Unfortunately I don't think there ever will be google docs alternative that people will easily accept because it's almost impossible to build business based on competing with very complex/expensive product that google provides for free. It's clearly their loss leader and moat.

Many people view their personal emails being slurped up by a Google AI model as a pretty big negative.

If you pay for Workspace (like he says he does) your data is your own, just like for any SaaS product.

Then how is Gemini of any use?

I think it's reasonable to doubt this, and/or wonder how long until they decide to change this, and/or make exceptions like "to make your search experience better, Gemini now indexes your metadata (but only metadata so that's okay)"

Not really though. The data is also Google's and being in the US it's also accessible to other entities.

How do people get more than 2tb of backup/cloud storage? it seems expensive to pay 20+ per month for this. 2tb+ should be very common these days?

Does this include Gemini CLI the terminal vibe coding?

You can get all the domain stuff for less than 1 € from any competent hoster, e.g. netcup. For cloud drive, if you really want to put your own files on someone else's server, there are tons of cheaper options, e.g. 2 TB for 10 €/month from strato. Gemini is of course something that no one needs.

I really wanted to switch to the Proton stack and even tried it for a couple weeks but the search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets. I had to switch back to Google Workspace.

It doesn’t seem like Proton even really cares about the how bad their mail search is and is more focused on releasing new products.

Outlook online (I have M365 business basic) search sucks just as much. It finds really recent emails and ones from years ago but nothing in between for some reason.

The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows. And thunderbird doesn't work great with M365.

But anyway my point is even supposedly premium services screw this up.

>> The desktop outlook (the real one, not the 'new' one which is just the web version) is much better of course as it searches locally but it's only on windows.

I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding, but on MacOS there is a "proper" application: "Microsoft Outlook for Mac". As I understand this is called the "New Outlook" which is a native, non-Electron version. As it is not Electron based it is only 2.6GB (/s).

Anyways.. the search capabilities are insanely bad for searches outside of your current mailbox. It might be related to handling of large result sets where it just provides a limited set of random hits as opposed to a set with the most recent hits. When you provide from-to dates (from a hideously complicated "advanced" menu) the results seem a bit better.

edit/addition: on MacOS, Outlook supposedly uses the native "Spotlight" search engine. MacOS spotlight, when used from the Finder, actually does a really good job in finding the E-mail .eml files from the file system and, when clicked, they open up in Outlook.

> I am very confused by the MicroSoft product branding

Have a look at Word. The app, the web version, the Teams versions. Try editing in one and then opening in another - they aren’t even compatible. It’s such a nasty swamp.

Yes Mac is the exception. They still have a real app there. On windows they're discontinuing the real app for an electron one (or Webview2 as they call that)

It's unfortunately just a webview to their cloud outlook. If you have an account that's not with Microsoft they will pull your entire mailbox into their cloud (though they don't charge for it). Just pulling directly from another mailserver is something they don't care about.

I'm surprised the search is so bad on Mac too. But spotlight has degraded a lot. When it first arrived in tiger it was great but when I was last on Mac 3 years ago it was indeed pretty bad.

> the search in Proton Mail is so bad

Have you tried Apple Mail? I’d be interested to hear if it’s worse than that.

I use it, the search is very bad.

Apple Mail the client or the web?

Apple Mail.app is the fastest search available. I use it with o365 specifically for search.

The app. With MS365 I get terrible search results. And worse, my work email has access to some shared accounts which I can’t access from Apple mail as 2FA will only work for the primary account.

I use the bridge and a real mail client with proton and the search is fine. You can even hook the bridge into tailscale, so it works across my devices with a real mail client also (e.g phones tablets etc).

The desktop client is rubbish, though, agreed.

Proton is ok to meh - great marketing though. Try Infomaniak instead.

I've been a happy infomaniak customer for many years. They only had 1 or 2 outtages that lasted more than 1 day during all this time.

They are on my watch list however. The CEO is pro-surveillance, but was forced to back down due to the outrage of their customers, but he seems to be ethically quite questionable. But for the moment, I think they do a good job, but they should change their CEO to someone who unquestionably is against surveillance.

> search in Proton Mail is so bad I couldn’t use it for even simple things like finding my airline tickets.

Not sure if it's related but

  Proton does not hold your unencrypted email body content

consequently only you do once you are logged in. Thus you can't have server side search on your email content, only on email title. What you can have though is client side full-text search on body content. For that you have to enable it via the search box, details https://proton.me/support/search-message-content

It's not perfect but obviously it's a LOT more than searching only on titles.

Protons email encryption is mostly snakeoil and marketing. Their guarantees of strict encryption at rest is really only relevant to a certain class of people with a very specific threat model. Everyone else that uses the service is just leaking plain text email with everyone they converse with who uses a service that does not offer the same encryption guarantees.

So basically they sacrifice a usable search function for a security service that isn't relevant to 99% of people and isn't even effective half the time.

> mostly snakeoil and marketing

FUD much? Snakeoil would be false claims. There are plenty of problems with Proton but AFAIK not genuinely encrypting customer data is not one of them. If you do have examples please do share.

Marketing that might not address the average user who still get in touch with people relying on surveillance capitalism like GMail address sure but bundling both as one is dishonest IMHO.

Yeah I tried it and it was still unusable. I barely noticed any improvement.

I am using paid version of Proton Mail and search is working in thunderbird connected to their IMAP/SMTP bridge just alright. But web interface may suck, I did not use the web for a long time.

The web search feature isnt great. With the bridge youre unecrypting the emails and letting Thunderbird have full access so its as good as whatever Thunderbird (or other programs) have implemented.

Proton websearch is by default email title, sender/receiver only. You can enable full body search but Proton will download your emails to your browser so the search is local. They dont support server-side body search. If you have thousands of emails, youll need to download those first.

this is a soft case of "you're using it wrong/didn't read what proton mail is" they physically cannot offer you this functionality even if they really wanted to. Although you can enable message body search and it has to be indexed on your client (which takes a long time and is a pretty bad UX - but there is no alternative).

Instead (and this is the suggested way) you can link it to an email client which stores emails on device unencrypted using proton mail bridge. They could pre-load all content in your browser, but again it's pretty bad UX and you would sit there wondering why the search takes 1-2 minutes on a fresh window session if it was on "by default". You *can* use automatic tagging for assisted search (like "if contains flight, add flight tag") though if you want to continue exclusively using the web app(s).

But there is a pretty valid concern here: why don't the native iOS and android apps have an email index?! I guess they don't want to be caught "storing" your emails unencrypted? I don't know - should really be an option.

> 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.

This is wrong. There are loads of alternatives, which I can't remember at the moment. AlternativeTo.net lists Hyvor Blogs (https://blogs.hyvor.com/), which isn't one of the ones I was familiar with and cannot vouch for, but serves as an existence proof. Does anyone know any better ones?

https://www.beehiiv.com/ is another one.

They appear to be based in New York, which is in the US. They're also not very privacy-friendly.

Ah, yes. They're a step up from Substack in some ways though, from what people say, so it might be worth a switch compared to staying on Substack.

If you're comfortable going with a US-based provider, https://www.scipress.io/ seems a lot more honest. They've DIY'd their legal documents badly, but they prohibit AI-farms and don't appear to sell user data. If I had to pick based on first impressions, I'm far more inclined to trust Scipress.

Substack is both a blogging platform and a micro-social network with a feed and a subscriptions SaaS so really depends on what parts you want from it the most

Yeah, I haven't found any dedicated subscription-blog providers outside the US – but I definitely remember seeing at least 2 in the past!

boosty.to is a Substack alternative, outside of both the US and the EU.

https://ghost.org — Open-source run by a non-profit headquartered in Singapore.

From what I've heard from people who insist on using Substack even though it's American, VC-funded and full of dark patterns, they are trying to make money from their writing and are actively hoping to capitalize on its social network features. Basically they want Instagram or YouTube for text, they want "the algorithm", they want the recommendations, they want the analytics, they want the money or the fame more than they want to uphold their indie values. There is no non-US alternative that provides an equal-sized network effect, but if there was it would anyway be problematic because that whole model of monetization where the platform refuses to take any editorial responsibility incentivizes the production of clickbait, ragebait, misinformation/disinformation, scams, slop etc.

Of course for ordinary people there has always been an alternative to Substack, and it's the Bcc field in their email client. For folks looking to self-publish on the web, Wordpress has been around for decades now - there is no excuse for any serious writer or journalist not to know about it and the multitude of managed hosting options. Even for a newsletter-first option, there is Ghost. But if you discuss this with writers who move to Substack the answer is always the same - they want to try access the money or the fame that may come from being on the most popular social network for writing. I think the only fix for this broken ecosystem is for governments to dismantle these sorts of companies, but the US will never kill their golden geese - they are gladly taking a cut from every other country's content creators.

Keila: https://www.keila.io/

Open-source, managed service, based in Germany, and integrates with Proton. Authoring in a block editor or Markdown. Optional built-in analytics with a focus on preserving privacy. Web-hosted posts added about two weeks ago.

You probably know but Substacks’ free speech thing is a huge turn off.

That’s how you end up sending push notifications for your latest Nazi content.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/substacks-nazi-p...

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/substack-e...

unfortunately some occasional hate speech is the price we have to pay for free speech

Some countries choose that path and they are where they are.

We are where we are due to our choices too - New Zealand.

There are countries with freedom of expression without this pseudo-'free speech' BS.

Unfortunate as that notification error might be, you cannot call free speech free if you only allow if for some opinions.

"Free speech" is a thing between persons and the state. It does not require persons to accommodate nazis.

Some corporations claim otherwise because they think nazis are good for business.

> Some corporations claim otherwise because they think nazis are good for business.

And they are right at this time in various major tech hubs.

We will see how that works out.

It'll probably be fine for the corporations. Not necessarily for the people comprising the corporations, but the fictive legal constructs will do absolutely fine.

Nazism is not an opinion. It is a dangerous ideology that has cost the lives and freedoms of many people. And will do so again, if left unchecked.

There are many other dangerous ideologies out there. Having said ideologies should be allowed (freedom), doing bad things of the name of said ideology shouldn't.

I accept that some people think others are inferior, even if to me they are idiots. I would even be ok if they say it out loud without harming anyone, I just won't listen to them.

while a blog is like the simplest thing you can self-host apart from static sites

For me its going from $0 to $15 a month using Proton which feels way to high. Im cutting proton and switching to Proton free tier for email and Backblaze for storage. Getting a little $100 pc to put in my draw to handle hosting all the stuff i need. My budget is around $10 a month to cover all the tech NEEDS. I think its doable but I will need to pay with my time to learn about/setup a foss stack. I'll also need to put some money aside to drop a donation to each project in the stack yearly.

I don't think a $10 budget will suffice.

My tech needs arent huge. Email+email alias service, cloud storage for PC backups and syncing data across devices, VPN, server to host internet thangs, domain, mobile data. Yeah now that im laying it out $10 is not going to be enough but i'll try my best to work within the constraints and see what I can do. I'll probably do a need budget for $10 and a wants budget of $20.

You really don't want to host email yourself. Major PITA, time sink and constant possibility of your emails being just silently discarded after being accepted at the big providers.

10 USD seems like it should cover the electricity for a small mini PC server (counting maybe 30 watts idle), and if your electricity isn't expensive, it will cover the purchase cost spread over a few years too.

That of course assumes time is free, so I wouldn't compare it to cloud pricing directly. I'd also personally budget in incremental backups.

If Proton is too expensive, you can use zoho. I switched from Google and I'm missing nothing.

I moved from Zoho to Gmail, b/c of their pricing. Google's basic plan is $7/mo [0], whereas the lowest cost plan with zoho is $25/mo [1].

Zoho's free plan stopped offering custom domains and/or limits imap access.

[0] - https://workspace.google.com/lp/business/ [1] - https://www.zoho.com/us/billing/pricing/

The zoho link you provided is for the billing product, not the email product. I use zoho with three low usage domains and pay $1 a month.

https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Proton’s $4 a month is where I ended up landing a few years ago and it’s cheaper with the 2-year lock in they give every now and then. Sharing just in case it’s buried under unlimited. Although our usage may vary in case there are things in unlimited you need.

Infomaniak is cheaper and in my experience a lot better swiss provider.

Grammarly alternative: LanguageTool. Used by EU institutions

And it works great for my languages. I really like it.

LanguageTool also belongs to an American company, because it was acquired by Learneo in 2023. You can also see this on the LanugaTool website. If you click on Imprint, you will see a German company, but if you go to the terms and conditions, it suddenly becomes an American company.

Just tried it. Kind of awful for swedish, try “dem slår de”.

Kudos. We're finding it hard to migrate away from Google Sheets in particular due to all the plugins and integrations around them. For the other things you listed we also don't rely on Big Tech. Not keen on Proton though, they seem dodgy and IMO the number one candidate for being the next Crypto AG. Besidea that, it's still "all your eggs in one basket".

Okay looks like proton does a lot nowadays. But if someone wants a nice email provider that just works I can't stop to recommend posteo. A german email provider. 1€/month and they are just great. Been using them for 15 years now or something like that and I never had any problems. At least I can't remember any. They also always give out a transparency report[1] and apparently can't hand out much data to governments, because the data is just encrypted and they can't access it.

The only down side I have heard, that people have, is that you cannot use your own domains.

- [1] https://posteo.de/en/site/transparency_report

Not being able to use your domain is a pretty massive downside.

The great part about email is that you can move between providers without issues. I wouldn’t want to use a posteo.de email for all my services when I don’t know if they will be around in 10 years.

True and nowadays I would take that into consideration too. But I was young when I created that account (I think it was around some leak scandal or whatever that made me move from hotmail to posteo). But it turned out to be a nice decision.

For a business email this might not be cool tho. I get that

You can always use AnonAddy, SimpleLogin, or similar to receive emails at your domain then forward them to Posteo.

Vivaldi doesn't block ads as well as uBlock Origin, so I'll stick with uBlock Origin which means Firefox and friends anymore.

You can run uBlock in Vivaldi.

Not on mobile.

uBlock origin does indeed work, and ctrl+e is really nice, so I'm actually using Vivaldi as my main browser now. It's nice.

As a Todoist heavy user, I was intrigued by their switch to Superlist.

According to their Privacy Policy, they sure are a German company and have their core infra on Hetzner, but they rely heavily on USA-based providers for CDN and others: https://www.superlist.com/privacy-policy

Also, if they had a paid tier for Todoist, I don't see how the free-tier of Superlist will provide the same level of service/features.

So overall it looks like a fun exercise but the result is not true to the title and honestly feels misleading.

Am I the only one who doesn't care about E2E encryption, and just want an EU alternative?

I DON'T WANT my chats to be "full E2E encrypted" with a 6-digit pin, only for me to loose them when I get a new phone. I DON'T WANT having to use a special gateway instead of normal IMAP to access my Proton mail. It really feels like server-side encryption is being forced down my throat and I don't consent. FB Messenger, X Chat, WhatsApp, Signal, etc... NO. Just LET ME CHAT. This is why me and my friend groups are staying on Discord. Becuase it "just works".

I would like to see more EU companies which aggressively focus on being a just-as-good alternative to US tech companies, but HQ'd in EU for european strategic security, and without throwing usability under the bus.

There are 2.5 BILLION Gmail accounts. If people cared about privacy they would have switched to it, irrespective of where it is hosted. We need to focus on making competitive services which are easy-to-use.

Try Migadu. It’s great.

I find their pricing model strange. I can completely understand why they would want to limit outgoing emails per day. But limiting incoming emails per day feels strange, even if the limit seems reasonable.

What's this person's phone OS? This seems somewhat overlooked here. To me, the mobile OS is the centerpiece of any ecosystem. That leaves only two options.

Strictly speaking, that's not quite true. There's non big-tech Android distros like Graphene and /e/.

Those are both AOSP-based.

HarmonyOS Next (Huawei) is independent from Android. So that leaves three options, even if Harmony is mostly China focussed. They have tons of users there.

To me, it is the most unimportant one. I don't even read email on my phone. The screen is way too small to do anything useful.

I hear good things about Proton, but you are still sticking yourself into an ecosystem.

For documents, if you are even slightly techie, hosting your own OwnCloud/NextCloud is pretty easy. It just works. Both also offer a central calendar function, if that is important.

For email, buy your own domain, and host it with a local provider.

All the other things he mentions (to-do lists, password manager, etc.) just pick your favorite app, and store the data in OwnCloud.

Why are you stuck? To migrate to another provider i just have to change some MX records which I control myself anyway?

Pumping data in and out may take a while, but they expose an imap interface and it’s a right click in thunderbird or whatever to do this or a ./cli to dump an imap mailbox…

I tired NextCloud the other day on a 2GB DigitalOcean VPS. It ground to a halt pretty quickly. My plan was to try run it on a Pi, but I gave up on that idea.

It seems document editing is quite an intensive task.

A pi is too small. But a cheap n100/n150 box will do it just fine and is very energy efficient!

I'd love to switch my SaaS stack to europe. But loops, resend, cloudflare, supabase, stripe/polar are kinda baked in my SaaS starterkit and it's easy to spin up a new idea and test traction. So if anyone has alternatives, I'm all ears.

It is not an EU based stack. Proton is Swiss and Switzerland is not in the EU.

Close enough

Its close, but its not the EU. Would you describe using British services as an "all-EU stack?

I am not saying its a bad thing. It may well be better than the EU (I do not know the current state of Swiss law).

>*Would you describe using British services as an "all-EU stack"?

No, but I'd call the UK "England" without a second thought...

The title is “an almost All-EU Stack”

The most important part of it is Proton. the article says:

"The biggest impact on this migration has come from Proton".

Which was actually for me a pro argument of picking Proton. The EU has a growing need to monitor and spy on its citizens (see chat control madness). Switzerland is not perfect regarding online privacy, but even if Proton was hosted somewhere else, remember that they do encrypt (mostly) everything.

Another comment pointed out that proton is moving from Switzerland to two EU countries because Swiss law is getting worse.

I think privacy services and software will soon run out of safe havens to operate from.

Does anyone have experience with longer DeepResearch tasks with Mammouth? How does it compare to using Gemini's / ChatGPT's DeepResearch or GPTResearcher + API-based alternatives?

For standard questions I feel like it doesn't matter too much what you use. When it comes to multi-step searching + reasoning flows like look for alternatives, fetch pricing, feature lists, compare etc, the differences are larger because of the engineering glue and prompting around the pure LLM inference which makes the tools more or less powerful.

I would remove grammarly (due to privacy)

50% expenditure saving sounds good, but how many more hours per month are you now spending making it all work?

I started the same process some time ago. I've made different choices but with the same goal.

I'm moving slowly because this kind of migration is never easy, but I fully intend to move >90% of my stuff to European providers (and 100% of the critical parts).

Does Proton have transactional email already? Back when I was looking it did not seem to have it and I went with Zoho (not EU, I know) instead.

Proton is not EU either. it is Swiss.

The FADP is very similar to GDPR.

I am not saying its a bad thing, I am saying it is inaccurate.

GDPR like law and no chat control sounds pretty good.

What about OS that’s hard to migrate to a EU produced OS.

They moved from platform A to platform B.

And platform B is basically a worse version of everything than platform A.

I admire the motivation though

“Worse” is fully dependant on what you’re looking to get out of a product. I consider anything Google/Meta to be about as bad as it gets because I disagree with their business practices and value my privacy.

“Worse” has a defined meaning and they’re right. Proton stuff doesn’t hold a candle to the level of polish of Google.

So that definition does not cover "privacy"? Where does one look up the definition of "worse" you're referring to?

ah yes, the polish that keeps begging you to give them your address for your "own safety"

the polish that can't even delete your entire spam folder half the time

the polish that asks you to verify you own your own email address via email if you want to add an alias to send an email from your own domain (e.g: if you have wildcard inbox and want to reply from one of the addresses you used)

the same polish that gives you no results if you search "one" and the email actually contains "oneword" - you know, search, the thing google is known for.

such amazing polish.

Their level of “polish” extends to dangerous, unreliable levels of automation.

For anything enterprise related, I would avoid Google and their automated account bans without the possibility of contacting a human tech-support agent like the plague.

You pay for a SaaS solution to remove worries to your day-to-day, not to add more things to worry about.

Care to elaborate?

They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

That's a big deal to some of us.

Especially important it the demonstration that your privacy which Google et al, are so insistent on monetizing, does not mean they are charging you less for the same services that other companies can charge when you are paying only with your money, not your privacy as well.

I'd rather Google have my data than the EU

That's a choice. But it's not everyone's choice. And with <waves hands wildly around>, the non-USA choice is rapidly becoming more popular - at least among the people I know and talk to outside the US.

EU has always and always will be moving away from US tech

FWIW, my perspective is from Australia, not EU.

I’d argue the opposite, that the US is moving away from the rest of the ‘free’ world.

‘Free’ meaning not run by dictators.

Dictators typically don't win popular votes legitimately. Dictators typically don't have the courts constantly overruling them.

Europeans tend to have very little idea how the US government functions. Trump is able to do what he does simply because the people voted for a congress that supports him.

> Dictators typically don't win popular votes legitimately.

It also isn’t how you win in the US. The winner of the popular vote was Trump this last round (unlike his first term), but with a far-from-resounding 1.5%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presiden...

I'm sure this is trivia on the other side of the world but we learn this in 2nd grade

Is this new “I’d rather have Chinese my data than US”?

I mean I don't think anyone seriously thinks the USA doesn't have access to all the EU data.

That's a bold claim, are you implying that encryption is a scam?

All is hyperbole, but given the reach of big tech combined with intelligence gathering it probably does have that access to almost all. Not because of lack of encryption but because there are so many routes to getting that data. The combination of US domination of cloud services with even greater domination of device OSes the US has access to most data if it wants to.

> almost all. ... access to most data if it wants to.

Well that's a quite an important difference.

I do. I think many do.

> USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy.

I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control, and the latest news is that they're still trying / succeeding on some fronts. Please don't reduce such complicated matters to red vs. blue, it's really more complicated and there are no easy solutions anywhere.

> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,

Strange to compare "scares" with a business model that's 20 years old now. Sure the EU is far from perfect but it's like comparing a well known problem to a potential one. One is bad, the other might sucks. It's definitely not equivalent.

> It's definitely not equivalent.

We agree, but not for the reasons you think we do.

Chatcontrol is literally 1984. It's mandated at the provider level. You can't opt out.

You can always chose not to participate in the social media, sharing whatever you do. You can't not participate in chat control. Same same, but different.

But you get that it's still hypothetical at this point, while it's been going on in the US for, what, 20 years now?

You can't opt out because there's nothing to opt out from, chat control is not law, it failed to be approved every single time people tried to bring it up, sometimes it even failed before being voted on (like this last time)

FWIW I didn't say Chatcontrol was good. I'm saying there is a fundamental difference between a potential law versus an existing situation.

> I laughed at this, as an european. I mean just this year we've had like 3 scares with chat control,

Chat control is an EU thing. The article is about a move to Proton which is Swiss and therefore outside the EU and not directly affected by chat control or other EU laws. Of course the EU might make it illegal for them to supply their services to EU countries, but then no platform anywhere can avoid that problem.

On the whole EU govt surveillance (assuming you live in the EU) is better than EU govt surveillance plus US govt surveillance plus big tech surveillance.

Proton already announced earlier this year that they are leaving Switzerland due to legal uncertainty and relocating their physical infrastructure to Germany, which obviously is in the EU.

Have they moved yet? If not they are not EU yet.

Its also interesting that they have chosen specific EU countries and the differences between countries does matter.

What happens if, as is probable, the EU brings in similar laws?

> They moved from platform USA/Surveillance-Capitalism to platform non-USA/Privacy

I see, the EU propaganda shows effect. Of course a proponent of the non-elected regime doesn't mind the illegal "chat control" and censorship of any wrongthink facilitated by the Digital Services Act.

Care to elaborate how chat control came into effect?

Last time I checked, it was always rejected, no matter how they reforrmed it. The EU is not one voice, it will always have different opinions. What matters is what's actually voted into law, chat control tried multiple times and it never was.

Also, would you be so kind as to share those wrongthinking related with DSA?

So we an focus on improving things and not bashing on them.

I have fully bought into Apple’s ecosystem. It’s a walled garden but it’s a pretty nice walled garden, and of all the big tech companies, they are better about privacy (not perfect, but better) than most. I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

just untrue lol. people literally just believe any nonsense they read. in a pedantic sense any company, where you send things to them is just "going into a log somewhere to be monetized" if you mean having logs can help improve the product which makes said company money...

so, to narrow things down this is presumably about personalization - in which case that's obviously just untrue.

assuming it's in the pedantic sense, most logs at google are not directly monetized, nor are most logs at google even part of services that even roll-up to ads.

How so?

where's the proof of the claim? for one the privacy policy contradicts.

It sure is a nice walled garden, but it can also be pretty restrictive: You can’t subscribe to iCloud from a regular browser, which makes those privacy benefits inaccessible from Linux, while Apple is perfectly happy to take my payment info for Apple Music or Apple TV.

> When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

I've got a bridge to sell you if you think Apple isn't doing the exact same thing. What do you think they are doing with all their focus on their ad business?

Apple has a solid hardware business and massive profits from their App Store tax, they are not dependent on ad business in the way Google is. Very different incentives.

They might not be dependent on ad revenue, but they are a greedy company that will not leave any money on the table. Next year, more ads are coming to the App Store that already generates a profit of over $10 billion/year: https://9to5mac.com/2025/12/17/apple-announces-more-ads-are-...

Not sure if the comment is a satire, but

> I avoid Google like the plague and only use it when I have to. When you’re interacting with Google, everything you do is going into a log somewhere to be monetized.

HN needs to make an exception for clown emoji.

I Spend 0. I don't understand why anyone would need most of these services.

Try reading more books, eg autobiographies or fiction. Understanding other people’s perspectives is a skill like any other.

Maybe you should take your own advise and try to understand his perspective.

Understanding a perspective and agreeing with it aren’t the same thing. Herring’s point was about the ‘I don’t see why anyone would need this’ framing, not that the position itself is hard to grasp.

This is a logical fallacy like saying one should tolerate the intolerance, because otherwise it's intolerance.

Still looking for that microphone you dropped!

Trying to understand everyone is a foolish endeavor, if not outwardly judgemental.

What's more valuable is simply accepting that there are others who are different.

Same. I mean you can tell about the level of tech literacy just by reading that OP uses NordVPN.

I find it funny that right at the start the author claims he wants "privacy and data sovereignty" and then he comes into the EU.

Now, Proton is based in Switzerland (thank god for some sane countries in Europe that still remain), but EU is not friend to your "privacy and data sovereignty".

Countries in EU are going after you (and demanding that external platforms disclosure your anonymous identity so that they can put you in prison) because you write "wrong" stuff on the internet. Like, simply calling a - morbidly obese - politician fat. Imagine if that platform was based in the EU. [1]

So, no. EU is not the solution for your privacy. Unless you only care for businesses using your data (which is still bad, of course), but appreciate having the government (and the unelected European Commission) Big Brother watching over you and policing your words.

They are both bad, but they aren't both equally bad. Sure, the businesses can use what I write and see to put even more silly ads in front of me or even train some LLM. But, at least, they won't put me in a Gulag for re-education because I committed some thought crime.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/media/germany-started-criminal-inves...

I started watching YouTuber Evan Edinger recently and it’s been a breath of fresh air because he’s been saying things I understood to be true a long time ago, but never quite verified until now.

One of those being about American exceptionalism and how Americans will only ever make judgement about other countries (including the EU) from the highly deformed perspective of their local news. And they’ll do this, knowingly, with no remorse, because they’ve been taught all their life America is the best so there are no reasons to doubt or consider that things aren’t quite right.

Being a continent away, with no idea what is going on over here, americans don’t understand EU culture, nor how it relates to German culture. Fox News does not understand what exactly happened in that particular case you linked, let alone you who is reading a ragebait-fueled summary of it.

You also clearly don’t understand how the European Commission works and what it is able to actually do.

Should I bother correcting you? Of course not: you are most likely not interested otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation. The information is available freely online if you so desire and if you are willing to get out of your comfortable bubbles that constantly prioritise the aforementioned American exceptionalism.

Bravo!

I’m European, you self righteous authoritarian lover.

And? You're linking a US media website, one famous for having its head way up the american exceptionalism hole.

Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?

> You're linking a US media website, one famous for having its head way up the american exceptionalism hole.

Oh, I didn’t notice we are already in the censorship phase and we can’t even link Fox News. It’s a factual news (but you are free to contest it) and if Fox is the only one willing to publish it, it says more about European descent into madness than you think.

> Also, didn't you vote to not call yourself European or something-something?

What are you even talking about? You people are insane. You need to be stopped before you destroy us all.

If Fox is the only one willing to publish it, it says a lot about the news story itself.... Whilst they may time to time have some journalism I'm sure, it's not a respectable news organisation in the same way as AP or Reuters and such. If it was a decent story it would be picked up on and re-reported by other outlets. There is not some conspiracy where all other journalists refuse to publish the 'truth'...

When your only problem with a news, is who is willing to give it instead of the facts on the news, says a lot about your notion of "truth".

Fox News does not have a reputation of reporting on facts, which seems to be your only claim here that this is “factual”. If it were, you’d find this in a neutral source. It’s a waste of time to even argue with you as I had predicted.

The facts are simple:

1. German authorities demanded GAB to disclosure the real identity of a user that called - a morbidly obese - politician, fat, so that they can persecute him.

Now, you can go on with your little show, pretending to be in your high horse where news that shows from Fox News don't count, so that you don't have to actually address the facts.

Go on, deny the actual facts if you dare.

Those are not "facts", that's a caricature.

In Germany, Beleidigung has been a criminal offense for decades. Courts (not "authorities") can compel platforms to identify users after due process. No one is being "persecuted", no one is going to a "gulag", and weight is irrelevant.

If you want to argue that criminal defamation laws are bad, do that. But stop dressing an old legal reality up as dystopia.

> it says a lot about the news story itself

What does it say then about the news story itself?

It says it’s a non story.

As I said above: Fox is not reputable, and if they’re the only one willing to run a story, that’s not someone speaking truth to power — it’s the equivalent to a wacko conspiracy theorist being the only person agreeing with you. Not a good sign, and not one that will get you taken seriously.

Whether the story has legs can be evaluated independently, and others have done so (it is indeed a non-story that was simply used as rage bait, which you and the other guy are falling for hard). But a lot of time can be saved simply dismissing fox as a sole source, because they have this reputation, and it’s earned.

You're British, so you're European when it suits you, and American when it matters. Two steps from the 51st state.

Is this HN now? Some kids going around name-calling?

What do you know of what I am or am not? What a silly thing to escape the actual discussion.

This is a lot of pearl-clutching for someone who opened with an insult and then ran out of substance. If you have an actual counterargument, try that. Otherwise, spare us the theatrics.

So many words with 0 useful information.

> EU culture

There is no such thing, and has never been. Europeans are different people with different cultures. No matter how much hackers and global projects want to exterminate those cultures and those people.

The equivalent would be to talk about "Mercosul culture" or "NAFTA culture". Or why not "NATO culture", or "BRICS culture"?

As someone who's lived in 7 different european countries throughout my life, I feel like I can confidently speak on the matter and yes, there is an EU culture. This does not mean there isn't also cultures individual to the countries, just like the latter doesn't mean there aren't cultures individual to regions or cities.

(You'd think this last part is obvious, and yet it seems it has to be spelled out for some, who'd rather pick random acronyms to strawman a culture question onto, than use common sense.)

PS- For the sake of your mental health, work on popping that bubble of yours you seem to live inside of.

As someone that lived in 4 different European countries, I can tell you, you only talk nonsense.

Go tell a Spanish or an Italian, that is normal for the authorities to go and investigate him and put him in jail for calling someone fat.

It's fascinating the amount of bullocks that comes out of your keyboard with an aura of self-righteous intellectuality, as if you are preaching some universal acepted gospel.

Have you actually seen the contents of the comment? Do you actually have an example of anyone that went to jail for calling someone fat? Also: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/18/tennessee-ch....

Buddy all you’re trying to do with all the screeching in this thread is pick an online fight with someone who doesn’t care about you. You haven’t answered any of the other people who contradicted you. Go tell someone else on a noisier forum they’re self-righteous if you want to elicit a reaction, cause I’m not interested.

For someone that doesn’t care, your really went out of your way - several times - to answer me with your lengthy, and funnily empty, dogmatic texts.

There's something of a common European culture, which has existed for centuries. Note: "European", not "EU". The EU is a steel tariffs union which has grown in scope to become an attempt of making member countries states in a federation.

The common European culture is foremost christianity, and secondly renaissance values, as well as nationalism. The latter mostly in domestic matters, such as welfare. But those values aren't exclusively European.

> For the sake of your mental health

Are you proud of expressing yourself in this way? Probably you're blowing off steam online anonymously, but if you rage and insult like this in real life whenever somebody doesn't agree with your opinions, you're not going to have fruitful interactions with other people.

There is no rage in my comments — I have better things to do than get upset at things online. I took a look at your own comment history however and it is … scary. Hence the “for the sake of your mental health”.

And yes there is an EU culture as well; just like there is a US culture not just a North American culture.

I'll let you end your year on a high note, without further comment.

Yes, countries in EU prosecute crime. This may be a surprise to some people, but for a long time publicly insulting someone has been a crime in Germany.

In America they don't wait for you to commit a thought crime, they throw you into a gulag right after trying to enter the country: https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2025/03/13/bc-woman-us-detenti...

But they're practicing the thought crime part by requiring your social media history on entry.

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