Signs of a growing distrust of US web platforms

Over the past few weeks I’ve noticed several people from the US who run personal websites making or pondering decisions about whether they should move their websites onto a non-US server. And what’s even more interesting is that these people aren’t overtly political bloggers or activists (as far as I’m aware).

On March 19 Brad Enslen posted a blog post called What if Trump Tries Censoring US Blogs? Where to go. In it he raised the question of what could happen to (US-hosted) blogs if Trump cracked down on dissent or limited free speech.

My observation is Trump is pretty vindictive against those who get under his skin. So are his henchmen and his GOP Congress MAGAs.

I also realized that all my blog hosts are US located.

So I went looking for fast simple to use, reasonably priced, foreign based blog hosts.

By coincidence a few hours later that same day Manton Reece, creator of the Micro.blog service, posted an announcement on his site:

Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those files can now be served from a data center in Europe.

He went on to say:

There is a lot of uncertainty in the United States right now, but Micro.blog is built for the world wide web. Our principles have always included a focus on web identity and permanence, with domain names at the heart of what we do. The distributed nature of the web makes improvements like today’s change possible.

The day after, in Time to ditch US tech services, says Dutch parliament, Ben Werdmuller blogged about the Dutch government following the lead of France and Germany:

In the wake of the French and German governments joining forces to build an alternative to Notion and Google Docs, the Dutch government has passed eight motions to avoid US software and move to a home-grown stack.

Today he’s published a new blog post called Is it safe to travel to the United States with your phone right now? commenting on an article on the subject in The Verge by Gaby Del Valle.

I’m a British citizen based on the south coast of England, but I felt like I needed to double check that the UK company who I use to host this website didn’t outsource their hosting to a US platform (they don’t - the servers are based here in the UK).

I do use a big US company for my CDN which hosts all the images on this site, but I have a back-up on my web server here in the UK, and I can switch this website to use the UK version of the images in a matter of minutes. I’m mulling over whether to proactively do this. But, for now at least, my site is safely away from the reach of the far right in the US.

If nothing else, this emphasises the importance of owning your own website (and the data on it) rather than trusting your online presence to a social media platform which is probably based in the US.