I’ve been focused, lately, on separation of concerns. Yeah, using FOSS tools is great, but I’m also asking myself how much losing a given tool will impact me if I start to rely on it.

This past weekend I finally broke away from ProtonMail. After what the CEO has been saying, and because of other annoyances like being unable to use anything but their clients, it was finally time to rip that bandaid off.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of using a standard protonmail.com email address, so now I have to tell everyone to stop using that. Also, I was a heavy user of SimpleLogin for creating email aliases for basically every service I signed up for, and now I have to switch all of those.

I should have learned this lesson when I left Google, but this time I will be using my own domain. I also took this opportunity to leave Cloudflare entirely.

Now I have a domain for my email address and my website through porkbun, but can transfer that to another registrar if they start to suck.

I use desec.io for my DNS needs instead of the built-in porkbun DNS tools to make it easier to switch to a different registrar if I need to. They’re a non-profit, and it’s open source software that I could potentially selfhost in the future. This also replaced Cloudflare.

I use fastmail.com for the actual email service, which let’s me use the apps I like on my phone and PC to interact with email the way I want.

Fastmail also has a service like SimpleLogin, but instead I went with addy.io (also FOSS; also potentially selfhostable) with another custom domain at porkbun.

My website is a blog hosted by write.as, which is, again, built around FOSS and selfhostable software.

All of these pieces can be swapped out without affecting the others if need be, bringing switching costs to near-zero, and making it very customizable in the process.