I was arsehole deep in American domain name services, I recently noticed. Between Verisign, Tucows and Cloudflare I had rigged my digital identity to blow in the event of any number of increasingly plausible crisis scenarios. I chose to own this mistake and begin the work of fixing it.

First, I decided to stop trusting Verisign. For starters, the deregulatory agenda of the new regime in Washington enables them to increase the price of .com domains. I weighed this alongside the Obama-era precedent of ordering Verisign to seize .com domains and decided it adds up to too much long term risk.

How much might .com domains cost by 2030? What are the odds of an "America-first" price hike targeting foreign registrants? How many plot twists away from politically-motivated domain seizures are we really? I don't know, and that's the point. I came to the conclusion that I prefer the known up-front cost of a migration over the unknown open-ended cost of the growing uncertainty.

I looked into the governance model of Internetstiftelsen, who operate the .se top-level domain, and I liked what I saw. They're a public service organisation who make important contributions to the Swedish technology sector and whose annual reports are available to read online. I'd like them a lot more if they could find a way to make things right with the people of Nieue but otherwise I'm happy.

Then I checked out Loopia. They’re practically synonymous with the web business in Sweden so it was the obvious first port of call. They’ve been bought & sold a lot but still seem to be running their servers in Sweden and the conglomerate they’re currently owned by is European.

Loopia’s DNS admin UI belongs in a museum but it gets the job done. I was able to replace everything I was using Tucows and Cloudflare for with Loopia. Thanks to their focus on Sweden their 2FA is just BankID too. Much prefer that over some authenticator app from one of the big US tech firms.

The downside of switching TLDs was having to do an email address migration. These are the absolute worst. It's hours of logging into every account one by one and trying to find the “update email” feature. There are a few categories of these.

1. There’s a web form to update your email address. It sends a confirmation link to the old email address and the update only finalises when you click it.
2. The web form immediately updates your email address with no confirmation step.
3. There is no web form. You have to email support and complete an identity check for them to update your address on your behalf.
4. There is no web form. When you email support they update the email address on your account immediately with no identity check.

Most services are in category one. Far too many are in category four. The slow process of finding out which category you’re dealing with as you log into each account one by one gets old fast. Makes your hands hurt after a while too.

Feels good once it's finished though. The simple satisfaction of honest hard work. And one less loose end to tie down before the storm.

GitHub's been my most-used digital service for years. Even interviewed (unsuccessfully) there once. To some extent it had become an online "home" for me. You know that feeling when you've lived in the same place long enough that you can walk into the bathroom in the dead of night and hit the light switch on your first try with one effortless flick of your arm? That's been my relationship with GitHub.

Until now, anyway. Doesn't make sense any more as a European to have your digital centre of operations in America. So I found myself on the market for a replacement. And bloody hell, what a replacement I found.

Codeberg is everything we should have wanted GitHub to be all along. It's democratically governed. It's a non-profit. It's led by its own community. It has a governance model that resembles a really mature and successful free software project rather than a VC cap table.

This is way more important than it might first seem. There's a lot of discourse right now about digital sovereignty in Europe. Codeberg’s democratic governance model has a key role to play in that, I think. The simplistic fantasy of a for-profit European GitHub falls apart when you explore how that company’s profit focus would force it to prioritise money over so-called “soft” values like sovereignty.

We’re unfortunate enough to have a case study demonstrating this. There’s another well-known alternative to GitHub, called GitLab. And GitLab literally originated in Ukraine. Then as the company grew, they moved their HQ to San Francisco in search of ever faster growth. And so now for all their commercial success they’re on the wrong side of the orange curtain. Oops!

So I was really excited to join Codeberg e.V. as a voting member and financial contributor. You’re even reading this post on the Codeberg pages server right now. This is 100% the future of free software and it feels cool as hell to play even a very small role in helping make it happen.