Rewiring

Migrating to European services - a review

It's been over a month since I started on my mission to move my app subscriptions, so now is a good time for some reflection.

Photos to NextCloud

Migration from Ente went really smoothly and I haven't really thought about it afterwards. Memories has been a solid app for viewing the gallery, collaborating on an album with friends is a breeze, and the auto-upload from the phone to the storage has worked pretty much as reliably as Ente's - that's to say, not. That's probably due to my power saving settings, but I don't mind starting the app once in a while to sync, so haven't looked into it.

One major thing to note, though, is that NextCloud's concept of 'hidden files' is not quite in line with my expectations. For example if I upload photos to ~/photos/.hidden they are not visible in the default explorer view - as expected. Unfortunately they are fully available in e.g. recent updates and recommended files lists, which to me feels like a major oversight. Compared to Ente's hidden and password protected files, the out-of-the-box experience of NC is not great.

Secrets and email hiding - Proton Pass

Moving from Bitwarden was not without issues and the experience is still not on the same level, but Pass gets the job done well enough that I'm content to stay.

The email aliasing has been a great feature that's made moving my app registrations (below) pretty simple:

  1. go to the site's settings to change the email
  2. in Pass, open the entry for the site and use 'hide my email' - this generates a new proxy email address
  3. copy it to the site, save, click the confirmation link or whatever they need

Some sites have blocked registrations from e.g. passmail.com, which is one of the domains that this feature uses. I understand completely, since this could be used for e.g. infinite free trials if email address is the only identifier you have. This encourages providers to either use aggressive fingerprinting or requiring payment info upfront. It is of course unfortunate on my side, as I just want to treat app registrations as ephemeral as possible. If the site wants to protect itself like this, I can hardly protest, besides maybe not registering at all. I haven't hit any critical walls yet, but I imagine there may be some e.g. payment processors that don't take kindly to such domains.

This is where Fastmail's approach was superior - it was using fastmail.com as domain for both normal and masked emails, so domain checks cannot be used to detect 'malicious' traffic.

Email to a Finnish host + own domain

Moving from Fastmail was a breeze, with the most difficult thing being coming up with a nice domain name.

There hasn't been any issues that I'm aware of. Apparently GMail did flag my first group message as spam for some (curiously not all), but since then all messages have seemed to pass fine.

The combination of Thunderbird + Proton email aliases has been great. I don't have to share my actual email to anyone I don't want to, keeping it safe on the registration and even on the email reply side, as all I have to do to keep a conversation going is 'reply': the Proton system sends all emails to my inbox from a forwarded address, to which I then reply, and they redirect back to the sender.

When the actual domain eventually leaks, the question is how well the provider deals with the spam that follows. Currently there's none, so I have no idea about their filtering capabilities.

I'm still in the process of porting all my previous app credentials, mail list subscriptions and such to the new addresses, which I will probably procrastinate on until December when the deadline hits, since it's not exactly the most stimulating experience...

Uruky as a search engine

This was the one I was most skeptical about. I went into the migration from Kagi with very low expectations, but surprisingly, it hasn't been nearly as painful as I thought. Sure, there are no ? queries to quickly get a bot assisted condensed answer, but after a few days I noticed I didn't really miss them. The traditional 'here's the list of pages matching your query' is... just fine.

After the initial tweaking I've been happy with the search results, and am finally a bit piqued to delve a bit deeper in the settings - which indexes to use and in which order. The team has been pumping out small nice improvements on a constant pace, and we actually swapped a few messages with the co-founder as they'd spotted my original post, which gives me a good feeling moving forwards.

As difficult as it was for the one-month-ago-me to believe, Uruky did replace Kagi in my toolbelt. I've just topped my account for another year - 60€ well spent!

The price

Talking about money, let's see how it ended up:

(in €/$ per year)

So that's roughly 205€ per year I paid previously.

Now:

And that comes up to ~230. For me this actually saves money since I already had the Storage Share, but even from zero, not much more expensive. Without the email domain, it would be pretty much even.

Going forward

I don't see any reason to go back to the original services, excellent though they were.

What's left is to finalize my own side, then support the immediate family to move their stuff too, as naturally I onboarded them to these services in the first place. A rolling stone gathers no moss and all, but I have a feeling that they're not quite as happy as me to migrate all their stuff to yet another service...

Seeing as this migration hasn't really changed my digital life at all, I'd say it's been a definite win and easily worth the effort.

Thoughts, comments? Send me an email!

#europe #tech