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Digital Sovereignty

A practitioner's first-person log of replacing US SaaS/cloud services with European or self-hosted alternatives across analytics (Google Analytics → self-hosted Matomo), email/passwords (Proton Mail, Proton Pass), compute and storage (DigitalOcean/AWS S3 → Scaleway, OVH for backups via rclone sync), transactional email (SendGrid → Lettermint), error tracking (Sentry → self-hosted Bugsink), and AI inference (OpenAI → Mistral, plus local models like Qwen), while explaining the deliberate exceptions kept on US infrastructure (Cloudflare, Stripe, Claude Code, GitHub/GitLab). It frames "digital sovereignty" as a practical risk-management exercise — knowing where data lives, avoiding single-vendor/jurisdiction dependence — and documents concrete migration friction (Proton's 3-domain cap, no content-based filters, OVH's buried lifecycle-rule config) rather than abstract advocacy.