Reddit to Lemmy has been hands down the best one so far. You lemmlings may be wierd at times, but not nearly as toxic as redditors.
Also moved from Gilette Fussion to a safety razor, cheaper, better quality (my skin is less irritated after shaving), and I feel like a boss when shaving.
From Chrome to Vivaldi & from Google to Ecosia.
And for lots of hygine products I moved to EU brands from US - ones. (Palmolive,Colgate, Lenor etc). I know Loreal, Beiersdorf and Unilever aren’t great companies, but local alternatives are crazy expensive.
Deleted Insta, unfortunately way too many people refuse to move from What’s App to Signal.
Switch from Vivaldi to Firefox.
firefox to icecat
Use Vivaldi only for Gather.town at work. PITA with FF
You lemmlings may be wierd at times, but not nearly as toxic as redditors.
This seems to be true for most users. However, I feel that the administration is toxic and nontransparent. It is not very transparent on reddit either. However, maybe I should go for a different instance.
Which safety razor?
Mootes & Tiger platinum blades.
moved here
Moved business and personal email from ms to Proton. Wow turns out I really missed a simple email interface. And it’s saving me about 23 hours a day not logging back into o365 for the thousandth time.
Dunno why it took so long, we’re full Linux with the odd mac. The office admin panel is so fucking awful I could never work out how to backup. Turned out Proton can just import…
Proton is nice and surely better than Office, but let’s not forget that the owner of Proton publicly supports Trump, so I’m planning to move out of Proton ASAP
Lol nobody supports trump, they had one unfortunate post on twitter that some people (un) intentionally misinterpreted. The drama is over, so maybe time to move on?
Windows -> Linux CachyOS Google Mail -> Tutamail Amazon -> Buying local where possible
Best decision ever…
And quitting all the social media crap and using feddit now.
Still looking for a Twitch alternative. There are some, but the content is lacking…
Watch Twitch with Firefox + ublock origin maybe?
Different to what most people are doing, but I’ve been thinking about dressing more European. So many popular casual clothes come from the US: bomber jackets, duck chore jackets, baseball caps, most sneakers, jeans. The last two alone are permanent parts of “default dude uniform”.
So I now e.g. have:
- a harrington jacket (ironically the name comes from an American show, made in China from UK brand) - it’s an English golfing jacket by origin
- a Shetland sweater (made in Shetland)
- a tartan wool scarf (made in Scotland)
- some corduroy and moleskin pants for the winter (Made in Bangladesh, UK company)
- wool balmacaan-style overcoat from Italian tweed made in Portugal
- chukka boots (Made in England).
Also eyeing a French chore coat.
You’d think doing this would be really easy given how the US came to be. Say, a suit is European, but wearing one every day is not as common as before. The overall theme in the west is that democratization is cool, while tradition is not. But when I think Europe, I think tradition. Hence the suit is European, but it’s not “cool”.
Corduroy and shetland sweaters are pretty “grandpa” as well. But I guess this is the arduous process of re-learning an identity after being fed American culture all the time while growing up. You just don’t know what’s yours.
As you can see by the items it’s all clothes that come from the UK. Again, it was easiest to pick the UK because it was the purveyor of European style, back before, you know.
Man dressing made in EU is soooo expensive though.
I found a few sales on avocadostore. With the sale prices they were the same as other slavemade brands on normal price.
What items do you have in mind?
A good “gateway drug” is buying second hand. It lets you get acknowledged with a brand and let you decide if you’d like to drop the retail or sale price on an item from them in the future. They don’t necessarily even need to be made in EU, just they need to come from a higher price bracket.
Here are my Vinted filters for mostly EU brands (only some are made in EU), they link to the Polish Vinted so maybe change the .pl to your region:
Poland has the most connected regions on Vinted so your results may vary.
Yes, but most of the time more durable, fair working conditions etc
For Shoes:
Portugal, mayby most famously, as well as poland have very talented cobblers who make great quality shoes while not being nearly as expensive as some of the bigger brands (looking at you, doc martens). Unfortunately the best way to find out about them currently is etsy. But I‘d reckon there are other platforms where they are active. Maybe it‘s even possible to contact them for sales circumventing Etsy.
OneDrive to pCloud.
OneDrive was absolute ass in the first place but i got it for free as part of uni. It was horrible for syncing files between devices and would often corrupt files.
PCloud just works. They also have a lifetime tier, so you don’t have to subscribe every year. My data is stored in Switzerland but you can choose to have it stored in the US if you really really want to.
Next best thing was changing from Gmail to Runbox. Excellent service at Runbox. I’m looking to transfer my domain as well but that’s proving a bit difficult at the moment.
We use OneDrive at work and it will often just randomly break for no reason. No mind to tinkering with it will fix it you just have to leave it alone until it starts working again.
Windows --> linux debian
I wanted to do this for a long time. But hesitated because i thought it is a lot of work and inconvenience.
Now I have done the transition and first of all it was very easy to install linux. A 13 minute youtube video explained everything step by step. I was done after roughly 30 minutes.
And now i am working/gaming on linux and it is like switching from an android to an apple smartphone. Everything is a bit different. But in the end it is the same.
Can strongly recommend it. Is super easy and just feels great!!
Jeans and Digital Services
PayPal to Wero or iban
I would classify Wero as US-dependent in multiple areas, since they incorporate US-based trackers. Also in a way that I believe is violating the GDPR. On top of that, the Wero app incorporates a US-based bug tracking system that the user cannot reject, other than maybe blocking it it with a firewall. I also have not seen them officially supporting any of the EU-made operating systems yet. Mandatory Notarization (by OS vendor) in iOS and Android is adding another US-dependent layer.
While there is more EU in Wero than in Paypal, it would be a false claim to call it “EU independent”.
OK still a good move but they could do better. PayPal is a useless middleman if wero is around.
I wish Wero was available in Italy :(
Currently going through transition, step by step:
Windows > Linux Fedora
Chrome > Vivaldi
Gmail > Eclipso
Chrome > Vivaldi
😒
Btw Fedora in backed by red hat and American corp. loved Fedora but switch to opensuse or Ubuntu :)
Really?? And I went through the whole process of removing Windows and installing Fedora 🙃. I didn’t know! Well, guess I’m going to Ubuntu then. Thanks!
opensource software doesn’t have a country. No need to change to ubuntu. The same software you run in fedora you will run in ubuntu.
IBM, intel, microslop, etc, all have developers that work in the linux kernel and provide patches and new functionalities. Are you going to stop using the linux kernel? Good luck with temple OS
TempleOS was built by an American
true. but templeOS was built with god’s instructions
Terry Davis is a… glowie!!!
It’s easier the second time. Ubuntu is London based and opensuse is German. Good luck!
Thanks! I’ll look into it.
Moved my main repositories off from Github to Codeberg. The latter is more minimalist, but has what it needs instad of being an overbloated mess with AI slop features. Cannot fullz abandon Github due to the vast amount of code there, also some projects I’m contributing to have no plans to move.
While I know I should have moved to single blade safety razors, Lidl’s own 5 blade offerings last longer than Gilette Fusion, while being the fraction of the price.
Windows -> Linux Mint Gmail -> Tuta mail Outlook -> mailbox Facebook -> [nothing] Instagram -> pixelfed iCloud -> Jotta cloud (not Eu, but Norwegian’s) Reddit -> Lemmy PayPal -> [nothing] More to come…
Windows => Linux Stock-Android => iodéOS CustomROM
And probably buying from Otto instead of Amazon. Works in Germany pretty well.
Streaming giants to piracy
Reddit to Lemmy
Any hints for an elder pirate trying to find a good torrent site? My buddy was kind enough to give me an invite to a decent provider but that was maybe a decade and a half ago…
My elderly ass just barely figured out linux, so you can see how behind I am.
- Get a good VPN that allows port forwarding. I can recommend AirVPN
- Use Linux (of course)
- Install qBittorrent as the torrent client.
- Enable the search tab, under plugins install the Jackett plugin
- Install jackett (on NixOS it is easy, otherwise you can use podman or docker to run the container image (preferrably NOT from docker hub but this registry, use podman)
- Open 127.0.0.1:9117 in your browser and set an admin password, copy the API key. Add all public torrent sites possible, it will take a long while and might make your computer go wroom.
- Search for something in qBittorrent, you will get an error as you dont have the API key configured.
- Open the description page, it opens the browser and explains where to find the configuration file. Add the API key here
- Search things
- More advanced shit
I will make a post about my setup
Basically, dont use the sites directly, use a search engine that scrapes them. You need flaresolverr for some sites using Cloudflare. Apply for some private trackers, join communities to get invites. Remember to seed as much as possible and avoid hit-and-run.
Use qbittorrent. It has torrent search and download integrated.
Oh interesting, I have qbittorrent but have always just used it to on torrents I downloaded from a website. I’ll look into this, thanks!
I guess you have to change somerhing in the program options in order to make the Search tab visible
Try Usenet and a Usenet indexer. There are multiple guides on the internet on how to set up and use it, even automatically with some r-apps on a home server.
Usenet is very weird but funny in a way. As it is not actually decentralized and often involves fiat payment (non cryptocurrencies) I would prefer a good VPN provider (or even i2p) and torrenting
arr-stack is the secret weapon.
But for starters just a usenet client, a good usenet indexer and VLC are enough.
Recommended Usenet provider: astraweb with a block account. Buy 1000 GB for 50 €$ and use it over time for years without any subscription necessary.
Neat, I’ve vaguely heard/seen the term Usenet but haven’t looked into it, will do so! Thanks!
downloading torrents is very 2010s. Now we use Stremio app with torrentio plugin (or MediaFusion, or Comet). You get streaming from many torrent sites. Works on ios, android, many tvs, pc, whatever. There’s tons of other addons too like trakt.tv integration, etc. If you setup RealDebrid (paid, but cheap) thats even better, it acts as one big server with massive library of torrents, but provides very high download speeds, so you don’t need to worry about dead torrents or lack of seeders. I watch 4k movies without any problems.
Well that seems just wild! I’ll be looking into it this weekend, thanks, much appreciated!
It’s an absolute godsend. It’s a Netflix like experience for 3€ a month, only you get every content from every streamer there is
This seems so crazy good. I’m looking forward to spending some of this weekend researching and hopefully trying it!
The trick is to sign up to private trackers. Sometimes they have a open signups period.
- x to mastodon (long before the movement, I guess when the Ewong had to let that sink in)
- reddit to lemmy
- google to ecosia
- google to mailbox (long before the movement)
- a google phone to GrapheneOS
- jotta cloud
- amazon to otto
- several food brands and consumer products
Sadly, there are several services I cannot switch yet, due to profession.
What’s otto?
