De-USAification

How things have changed, looks like the USA is no longer a friend of Europe.

This feels so strange. For as long as I remember, USA was a close ally. In this new world, the US accuses and mocks the EU for all sorts of things, wants to take over Greenland, and wants to take over Canada as well. If you haven’t already, it’s worth listening to the Canadian Prime Minister’s speech at the World Economic Forum 2026.

Europe should use this situation as an opportunity to grow a spine and stand on its own feet.

While we are at it, over the next months, I will try to distance myself from USA-based products and move over to Europe-based stuff as much as possible.

This is my preference:

1. EU-based
2. Open source
3. Rest of the world (non-USA)
4. USA

Here are some resources I plan to explore:

• https://eualternative.eu/
• https://www.switch-to.eu/en
• https://www.goeuropean.org/
• https://european-alternatives.eu/

This is by no means a simple endeavour, and I am also not sure how well it will go. The reason is that, digitally at least, most of us are tied up in one of the two ecosystems: iOS or Android. We use them for critical stuff, like email, photos, maps & navigation etc.

There was some low hanging fruit I quickly picked up. Firefox for web browsing, and Mistral.ai for daily LLM use. So far so good.