Butterfly.archive

21/02/2026 - Stacks Across the Pond

=== Thoughts ===

I've made a steady, but concerted effort to move away from platforms owned by US Tech oligarchs. This is in part for my health—it's hard to overstate the amount of time I've spent endlessly scrolling social media over the years—but is in part an active mitigation against said platforms bending the knee to, shall we say, Orange pressure. This led to research into alternatives, informed in part by resources & initiatives like the EuroStack.

You can read a bit more about the EuroStack's potential in Cory Doctorow's Pluralistic article here: Threads' margin is the Eurostack's opportunity

It's a solid concept to get behind. Pooling your data and information is rarely a good idea from a cybersecurity perspective, so why should you do the same with your tech? When your devices, your OS, and your software are all linked back to a single nation, and trust in that nation's ability to operate in good faith is rapidly eroding, it's time to start segmenting your stack.

There are varying degrees of difficulty to this, of course. I'm writing this on a Dell laptop that's running Windows, so I'm not totally free just yet. However, I thought it might be useful to talk through some of what I've adopted, why I've adopted it, and how I've found using it.

Mobile device: Fairphone 5. They're on the Fairphone 6, now, but you can buy it here. This was one of the big leaps for me. Fairphone is a Dutch company that prides itself on sustainability and repairability. In hindsight, I should have bought the Murena model, since that comes de-Googled by default, but I was at the start of my journey at the time and a bit nervous to pull that particular plug (it's now a goal for this year). The devices are much cheaper and designed to last years, with swappable batteries and easy-install components. I haven't had to repair anything since buying mine last year, and it's still going strong.

Cloud storage: Proton. A Swiss company offering end-to-end encrypted cloud storage, emails, a VPN, and password manager. I condensed my OneDrive, anything sensitive on my Google Drive, and my emails into this platform, and I've not noticed a drop in performance. My one complaint is that I can't readily work on my writing on the move, but that's more to do with the next piece of tech than this. They're also very generous with storage and allow you to set up custom domains, which makes me feel very fancy.

Document processing: LibreOffice. This one's very simple. It's Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) and doesn't require you to connect an account or license to it. It doesn't have a lot of collaboration tools, but the existence of Proton's Docs and Sheets mitigates that.

Browser: Last one for now. I recently swapped to Vivaldi, which is built on Chromium. It's another privacy-focused browser with a ton of great features, one of which I'm using right now as I write this paragraph; the ability to arrange tabs like you would program windows on your desktop. I have a core set of web pages that, when I click on them in Vivaldi, open up like little side-bars, allowing me to work or look things up without necessarily distracting my flow. It's been a game-changer. Oh, and it has a pause shortcut, that mutes all browsers and encourages you to get away from the net. Handy.

That's the bulk of it, and I've really enjoyed the swap. It's been liberating to take intentional steps towards securing myself. Hopefully this little walkthrough encourages you to do some of the same!

=== Project Progress ===

=== Stuff I Found ===

=== Everything Else ===