Kicking Big Tech to the curb: Introduction

Welcome to this series of blogs about do-it-yourself digital sovereignty. I'm Robert, an advocate for open source and digital sovereignty, and a developer at Conduction.

Although for most people digital sovereignty has only become a hot topic since Mr. Trump's second term as president of the United States, I've been involved with this subject for much longer. Ever since the GDPR came into force in 2018, European (and therefore Dutch) privacy laws have been incompatible with the American CLOUD Act and its predecessors, but digital sovereignty goes back even further than that.

Over the years, I have of course used Big Tech myself. I too once created a Gmail account, and I still haven't completely weaned myself off Windows. That said, I've always been an open source advocate, even if somewhat reluctantly at times, and I generally tend to choose a small underdog over a party that dominates the market.

Using digitally sovereign solutions, open source software and small tech wherever possible is therefore a fairly natural choice for me. For instance, I've never used Google Chrome when I could avoid it. After Internet Explorer, I briefly used Firefox, before switching to Opera, at the time still a Norwegian company. Earlier this year, I traded Opera for Vivaldi, the browser that has by now become pretty much everything Opera should have been. I'll explain my choice in more detail in the upcoming blog about browsers (see the list below).

Since last year, however, this has become far more urgent, and I've decided to pick up the pace in making my own systems more digitally sovereign.

In this blog series, I'll take you along through the steps I'm taking to become more digitally sovereign, what the benefits are, but also which challenges I run into.

If you'd like to request a blog about one of the topics I'm working on, let me know via the contact form, and I'll see if I can move that blog up the schedule.

The topics I will cover in any case are:

• Nextcloud for home use: away from Microsoft Office, OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Gmail and much more
• Browser: Vivaldi, Opera but better
• Phone: /e/OS: Android without Google
• Social media: how and what?
• PC and laptop: goodbye Windows?
• From GitHub to Codeberg: suddenly we had to move
• The niches: what haven't I quite managed to pull off yet?

Finally, a recommendation: if you find these blogs interesting, also read the book 'Soevereiniteit! Hoe dan?' ('Sovereignty! But How?') by Brenno de Winter¹, which covers the same subject from a broader perspective.

Footnotes