Welcome back to the Digital Ecosystem Potential.

While I have just started this newsletter (this is the third edition), I have stepped back over the last few months to rethink what I want to focus on.

In my startup business, our mission is to support the development of open digital ecosystems. In part, the motivation for this was to ensure I am contributing to solutions in which businesses and organisations can jump off big tech monopolies and move away from a "winner takes all" mentality to a "share all" approach where there is enough business and opportunity for all of us to share in the market when we offer valuable products and services.

We shouldn't want to all be billion-dollar businesses, or pay ourselves ridiculous sums of money while workers don't get their fair share and while using energy and water exponentially. In the digital realm, that means having a focus on interoperability, using open standards, supporting integration technologies, allowing everyone to build and co-create, tracking impact and value for society/economies/environment, and so on.

That's why the EuroStack ideals appeal to me, and why I wanted to write this newsletter: to track the adoption of an approach that focuses on digital sovereignty and on building digital infrastructure that can support open ecosystem models. It also gave me an outlet for discussing challenges that I see, such as the risk of simply replicating the US model, but with a bunch of white European guys. Last edition, I talked about the importance of seeing EuroStack as part of a decolonisation approach. If technologists can agree that being a digital colony of the US would be a bad thing, we must also use our technology and policy making to reverse the colonisation that Europe currently benefits from.

The good news is that the policy ideals of the EuroStack are gaining traction. The advances were most recently referenced again by Cory Doctorow in the 2026 manifesto-like, required-reading piece "The Post-American Internet".

So this month, let’s talk about shifting to a EuroStack small business techstack in practice.

I have been on Digital Ocean (DO) as my cloud server (because I didn't want to use AWS), but DO is US-based and, in addition, one of the investors is Marc Andreesen who is a straight up fascist, so I am trying to disentangle our business from anything to do with that guy.

We have a number of data products in production so with the support of the awesome fullstack developer, Alexei Garban, we are shifting to OVHCloud. OVHCloud has its own challenges, luckily we are on a generous 10,000€ credit annual startup program, although I am currently trying to resolve an issue where those credits haven't been applied this month leaving me with an invoice higher than what I used to pay on DO. Also OVHCloud isn't as user-friendly or have one-click type management of the interface in the way that DO did, so I need my developer to manage our resources, whereas I could usually get by myself on DO.

Case in point: I have my own NSFW gay fetish fiction and personal writing site on Ghost that I started myself on DO, but wouldn't have the same ease of installation on OVH. I would also like to spin up a new Ghost site as part of some local volunteer work supporting access to preventative HIV treatment (for some bizarre reason there is a two year waiting list in Catalonia for Pre-exposure Prophylactic Treatment for HIV —PrEP— despite it being able to help eliminate HIV in our lifetime if available), but doing so on OVHCloud myself looks like a hassle.

Next edition, I will describe some of the migration techniques Alexei used, for example, it sounds like he first uses a service called Coolify to create the front-end server and then that helps with a one-click type installation for a lot of the services we use.

I am also migrating from Google workspace to the Latvian-based OnlyOffice Docspace which we will self-host and which allows us to have storage and email and other services. I will report next month on how the migration path works, it is a risk and I was hoping to do it in January while the year spins up. I don’t love the OnlyOffice interface as it looks very Microsoft-y rather than like Google workspace, which I do love from an interface point of view. Although the functionality has been getting worse. Search in Google Drive is completely broken, and again, who wants to support Google these days. (I should have jumped off when they fired Timnit Gebru in the same way that I moved from Spotify to TIDAL as soon as they gave Joe Rogan money.)

Also, when Google started forcing Gemini into everything, I had to write to their support to get the additional menu options turned on so I could turn all of Gemini off and then they increased their monthly bills cos they have integrated Gemini, even though I don't use it they insisted they had to put the prices up because of these new features.

Speaking of AI, I do need to use and acquaint myself with these products, and I have found some place for them. For the general purpose chat-like questions I use Mistral. I will dig deeper into sharing the other AI products I use in a future newsletter edition.

For our website, we have used Strapi for years now, and I won't move off that. I am really impressed with them, and have used their open source product for 10 years now. We did try building in the open for Strapi, creating an open source blog component product, and we contributed some content at their dev relations events, but we didn't really find our place or have the resources to invest in growing that. I would like to return to the idea of contributing since we have benefited so much from them. I might try and set some goal on that for this year, if the team wants to prioritise that. I do need to think through if we are using more open source, how do we also contribute to the software we benefit from, if we aren’t paying for it? I also plan to join the Open Source Initiative this year.

I am moving from Slack to Zulip, maybe: I am trying it for a month, but our challenge here is that my partners are resistant to having to install and use another platform. I was hoping to move to TwakeChat, but that has an interface more like Whastapp groups, whereas I am looking for something with a channels-type interface. Still, one of my new partners was reluctant to start in Zulip so we are chatting on Discord as he already has that. I totally get that there needs to be a certain population size on Zulip before people will be willing to make the jump. This year, I want to encourage a community of practice around open digital ecosystems, but as a new community organiser in this way, I am cautious about trying to kickstart a community on a little used platform and not somewhere where everyone already has an account like Discord. The downside of Discord is that for me it is super messy and comes across as too Snapchatty (full disclosure: I have never used Snapchat and don’t actually know what it looks like but i presume cat masks?) and has too many in-your-face paid features it pushes like stickers and animated emojis.

I have preferred using non-US tech in the past anyway, so we use MailerLite for work newsletters, although i am on Beehiiv for this newsletter contradictorily to its theme. MailerLite isn't ideal for text-heavy/blog-like newsletters like this, but I haven't really found an alternative. The weird thing about MailerLite is they just released two new features and neither of them was a Beehiiv/Substack type competitor (now that i think about it, I don’t see as many newsletters, like this from Europeans, are we blog people?, that would be cool). I was thinking of setting up another Ghost site for my text newsletters, but then you have to use Mailgun for newsletter sending, or I will try Listmonk maybe? (From a consumer point of view, I avoid using Substack and while I subscribe to a range of paid newsletters, I do not subscribe to any that are on Substack — at the moment I subscribe to Molly White, Today in Tabs, and Garbage Day and will probably look to subscribe to Euractiv next. (While I also don’t admonish people for being on Substack, I don’t read it unless it is really unique work related content, and I never share Substack links on Bluesky or anywhere.)

I stupidly set us up on Stripe, but I try and not use it. Instead, I am using Wise for credit card payment links, although I think they are having a scaling issue at present: my request for access to their payment link service is taking almost a month to resolve, which isn't great for my business. All they had to do was look at my website, but I think because when i shared the link I didn't put https:// first, so the automated bot rejected my website and now it needs to be reviewed again and it is taking a long while. My fear is that these services are replacing customer service staff with AI and they just don't have the teams available to address issues, so I am looking for an alternative.

(Aside: As I constantly write about in our open banking work, given the size of the global remittance movement built predominantly on the ability of migrants to pay a service fee for cross-border transfers, I don't understand why no remittance or global payments transfer fintech hasn't started identifying additional financial services this population would appreciate.)

I like what Adyen are doing, so will move to them maybe. I need to evaluate the best options for me. Stripe is increasingly problematic: they cull staff when they increase profits and they could easily retrain those staff or offer them generous packages that helped them set up a business in the Stripe ecosystem. For example, they have a greenwashing-like environmental product. Why not shift some of their staff to building more sustainable IT infra, or instead of retrenching their staff in waves last year, why not given them grants to set up as systems integrators that could help future Stripe clients to integrate into the Stripe platform. Surely that would be a growth market? (Also, they invested heavily in that stupid idea of setting up a tech city outside of San Francisco, not sure what is happening to that silly idea, it's some kind of Andreesen citizen indentured servitude model.)

I have moved from ZohoBooks to Holded this year, in part because here in Spain they have introduced mandatory QR codes to be added to invoices and while ZohoBooks would probably do that, I would prefer a European solution. Also, i turned off auto renew for ZohoBooks in September and they still automatically renewed my subscription so I am trying to address that at present.

Interestingly, there actually aren't many alternative choices: Xero doesnt offer the QR code even though it is a regulatory requirement and I think other countries in EU like Poland have it as well, I don't want to use QuickBooks given how they behaved around TurboTax, forcing US citizens to pay for free tax submissions basically, and there aren't that many other European options that I could find. I am disappointed how Holded don't offer open banking credentials, so I have to either give them my bank passwords (which I won't) or manually upload my account details (which is a hassle when I need to automate as much of my financial records management as possible so I don't fall behind on it). I wanted to use Hodled years ago and raised this as an issue and even now it is not addressed. Maybe an API aggregator company could approach them?

I use a combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Apollo from US, and the Estonian-founded Pipedrive. I am lucky enough to be coached at present by the Austrian-based Alpha Lead Academy, after working with two other sales coaches in the past that didn't gel for me. Again, maybe my processes when I move more to European tech will be worth unpacking(there will be little open source in this category), let me know if that’s of interest to you.

The challenge with setting up another selfhosted option (like Listmonk for newsletters) is the same challenge I have overall with OVHCloud. I actually need my developer's help on our client-facing digital products and services. I can't have him devoting more than say 1/5th, if that, of his time on managing our infrastructure.

We release most of our work under Creative Commons licences, and we have now moved to having an open source-first policy in my business. So we selfhost our internal and partner-facing wikis using DocMost. I use MixPost to schedule social media on LinkedIn and Bluesky, and I have been playing with Baserow to manage smaller datasets.

But I also pay for cloud-hosted open source as a solution. We will probably use Spanish-founded Penpot for our design library and as a Figma alternative (although there is no real alternative to InDesign so we had to resubscribe to Adobe for our publication design work for another year) even though they host on AWS, and we have paid a subscription for Plane, which I love as my business management planning software. It is probably my favourite new tool, and I am excited by their ambitions. But unlike OpenProject (which has similar functionality but a WindowsXP-like interface which was a dealbreaker for me), Plane don't offer a choice of cloud providers. (OpenProject offer AWS or French-based cloud provider Scaleway.)

Plane have said there isn't the demand for offering an alternative to AWS at the moment, which is where they host their cloud offering. While I avoid AWS for myself, I have had to use many services that run on AWS, as there are often few options. Melissa Whittaker shared recently about why Signal has to use AWS for now:

For example, when we were on Airtable to manage our datasets originally before we grew and matured to PostgreSQL, we had to accept that they used AWS.

The very-responsive Plane team shared on their Discord community (see how ubiquitous Discord is?): "AWS remains a preferred provider for almost all of our customers, either that or they self-host, which is as big a chunk as those on our Cloud".

So the good news is that open source software consumers are evenly split between cloud and self-hosting: "Our customers are self-hosting for the usual reasons—more security, governance, control."

Plane said they are open to offering other cloud services, but it didn’t sound like they have been asked much about it yet. It would be interesting to hear what proportion of those self-hosting are based in Europe, and if they could be specifically asked if their selfhosting was on AWS cloud or on other cloud infra. In the meantime, I wanted the business-level services from Plane without burdening my developer with DevSecOpsing OVHCloud for this service, so we paid for a year and will revisit next December.

I think there could be a role there for either cloud provider partner leads or EuroStack advocates to help support those open source providers like Penpot, Plane and OnlyOffice to complement their AWS cloud hosting offering with a European cloud. Who could lead that in the emerging EuroStack ecosystem?

To be honest, I would pay cloud hosted services for OnlyOffice as well, even though it is on AWS and in the end would then mean there’s not much difference with staying on Google, but their cloud hosted services don't include email, as far as I can tell. I’d be willing this year to take the first step towards getting off google and supporting an open source alternative and then next year shifting to selfhost if they don’t have an AWS hosted alternative. That’s the trajectory I am on with Plane, at this stage.

That is a quick run-through of my tech stack, trying to show how it is possible to move off US-big tech for the majority of my business affairs. I am having some teething problems and will keep describing this as well as sharing other notes on implementing the EuroStack-type goals in my business and share how that unfolds.

This month the challenges are to complete the DigitalOcean and Google Workspace migrations, which I will write up in next month's newsletter to describe how we did it.

I would also like to figure out the community angle. As a test run, I have started a Zulip community channel for EuroStack subscribers who want to discuss how you can implement open source priorities or select European tech, or look at other impacts. For example, in a future edition I want to discuss business financing (Spanish taxes almost destroyed my business in 2024, many of my peers have specificaly set up outside of Spain for this reason). And there are barriers to having an organisational structure recognised in Spain that offers open source software. Open source is not defined by the tax office so how to tax a business that gives away software is unclear. I have heard a few providers say they don't declare it but keep paperwork in case they are asked because previous queries to the tax office came back with what-would-have-been-on-Discord a series of shrug emojis.

I'd love any feedback on this new direction for the main newsletter theme. I will occasionally dip into broader policy thoughts around EuroStack, but I feel like that is somewhat covered (although no one is talking publicly about the disconnect between not wanting to be colonised but ok with having been the coloniser, a piece I am still very proud of writing). What I see as missing is anyone discussing how this all works in practice from now. Maybe your thoughts on that could be your first message in the Zulipchat?