Ask HN: How would you decouple from the US?
However, it seems plausible that the US is turning into a rogue, authoritarian, Russia-like state increasingly more friendly towards Russia and hostile towards Europe. I am a European who grew up in a country still occupied by Russia. I am increasingly more worried about building my projects on American platforms, using an American operating system, etc.
What if the US actually attacks Greenland or finds another way to be openly hostile to Europe? I am not saying it will happen. All I am saying is that it seems prudent to prepare. How would you do it?
It is currently impossible to unhook myself from the US, but I would like to minimize exposure.
I can’t do anything about things like building an alternative to VISA/MasterCard (except wait for the digital Euro), so I will focus on things I can actually do and ignore things like my government buying F-35s and possibly giving my health data to Palantir.
* Mobile phone - there are no real European alternatives; it’s just Apple vs Google. Samsung or HTC with Android seems like a less bad option.
* Operating system - I have been using Linux for ages, getting rid of Windows seems relatively easy.
* Social networks - I grew to hate them before the current US admin, never used TikTok or Instagram, and I mostly stopped using Facebook and Twitter around the time Musk bought Twitter.
* Stripe for payments - this will be hard, but I am experimenting with our local payment processor, and so far it seems surprisingly doable, but it is not a battle-tested solution like Stripe.
* Clerk authentication - doable, but a lot of work and worrying
* AWS - I had a surprisingly bad experience with AWS and switched to a local provider with a lot less functionality (that I mostly do not need) and a lot better support
* GitHub, Cloudflare... dear God, how could we Europeans allow ourselves to be that dependent on anyone? Everything I touch is American.
* Gmail - this will be hard (two decades of emails). Any advice?
* Anything AI-related - fuuu, I am lost here.
What am I missing/forgetting? What do/would you do in my place?
I really hope you will take this as a brainstorming exercise and not an attack on America. I really do love the US and hope its democracy turns out to be more resilient than it currently seems.
EDIT: Please kindly keep responses practical. Let’s not turn this into a political discussion. You might approach it as a “what if” exercise, even if you think what the current US admin is doing is great, Europeans deserve what they get, etc.