blog:Putting some distance between our users and the new US administration

With everything that is going on right now — gestures vaguely in the direction of the current US administration — it’s tempting to throw up our hands in despair, spend our days doomscrolling, or just check out somehow.

Unfortunately, that’s not going to cut it for we are way into uncharted territory here.

To put some distance between our users and the new US administration, we have moved everything that is potentially sensitive to brand new infrastructure in Europe, using European companies, rather than US-based companies. Specifically:

• We’ve moved our backend systems from DigitalOcean in the US to Scaleway in Germany
• We’ve moved our software repositories from GitHub in the US to Codeberg in Germany
• We’ve moved our transactional email service from AWS in the US to Scaleway in Germany (ongoing)
• We have put a de-facto freeze on our Instagram account, and recommend you follow our accounts on freesewing.social, our Mastodon instance hosted in Germany.
• We have re-visited our choice to use Discord as the de-facto place for the FreeSewing community, and have instead decided that here too we would step both to safeguard the data of our users, as well as embrace the open web. So we’ve created a forum for the FreeSewing community (more on that below).
• While freesewing.org will continue to work as expected, we will henceforth use freesewing.eu as our main domain name.

All of these changes are already active, although some need some time to percolate to completion.

None of this will impact you as a user of the site. So, you may find this overkill. But people trust us with their data, and we feel a moral obligation to safeguard that data even from a potential adversarial administration in the US.