Practically every tangentially related to work external meeting I have had with other Canadians in the last year has included a segue where all parties discussed taking steps to diversify away from US infra/software/orgs.
It's the kind of activity where nothing seems to be happening, until it happens all at once.
e.g. We began researching, negotiations, and planning early in 2025 and only actually started migrating systems in December. We will begin cancelling contracts later this month.
@sarahjamielewis tell Blackberry to start making phones again!
Have you watched Cory Doctorow @pluralistic speech about:
A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet (a speech at 39C3 in Hamburg on Dec 28, 2025)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39jsstmmUUs
It's about the high risk of being dependent on US #techology & why other countries should get rid of the anti-circumvention laws (that they were forced to implement with threat of #tariffs) that prop up US #tech companies.
Worth watching.
@sarahjamielewis I wish my job was going in that direction too. Or at least avoided going in deeper.
@sarahjamielewis Sounds like this is the perfect opportunity for Canada and other countries who haven't already done so to switch to libre-licensed open source software and operating systems, funding the development of specific new programs to fill in whatever gaps presently exist.
In the long term, this will guard against vendor lock-in, monopoly creation, and easy trojan horse creation.
It's already a rich and vibrant environment and platform anyone can have a hand in expanding.
@sarahjamielewis This American thanks you! It is an act of solidarity with the people of the US to boycott and divest from the corporations that have a stranglehold on this country.
@sarahjamielewis
As an American, that owns a very small tech company, I'm in the process of moving everything I can away from these same companies. Probably can't get everything completely out of the US, but will do everything I can to ensure that we don't give another cent to these giant tech companies.
Good to see the rest of the world unplugging from them (and hopefully it will fuel more small tech again, instead of a few giants owning everything).
@sarahjamielewis I think that's for the best. It's a safety thing now, and the USD is tanking already.
@sarahjamielewis Also CF: https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/16/k-shaped-recovery/#disenshittification-nations
I am a US Citizen, and I am **so** ready for some country to actually, like, DO THIS.
@sarahjamielewis The US sadly by virtue of it’s poor decisions to allow shit heads to rule over us, deserves a shitty future, part of me believes it is a worthy cause and effect, not that we’re smart enough to learn from our mistakes. Que sera. 😔
Very prudent.
One of Trump's leading tech oligarchs intends to use customer data for his own purposes.
Data privacy isn't available any longer.
Your data is his data.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/16/oracle_vectorizes_its_customers/
https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/15/oracle_spending_shares_opinion/
https://www.sfchronicle.com/tech/article/project-2025-oracle-19654875.php
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/tiktok-algorithm-us-controlled-deal/
Consequences.
Some of these US vendors are toying with bankruptcy over ideology
@sarahjamielewis our company (EU), did the same thing, and we are halfway to phase out progressively our networking solution to @mikrotik (as i did myself last month).
Now many IT scratch their head to find a good replacement, but when the GO will be triggered US won't understand what happen because it will be FAST.
@lexinova @sarahjamielewis @mikrotik
Have you come across the Co-op Cloud approach?
Worth looking at. :D
@BillySmith @sarahjamielewis @mikrotik i'm not really interested the only hardware i trust is mine, in my own home, anything in the "cloud" co-op or otherwise is a walking red flag in my mind.
@lexinova @sarahjamielewis @mikrotik
That's why the recipe approach is aimed at people running their own hardware.
Yes, using external servers is great from a commercial-services-provision PoV, but the original intent was to run on your own local hardware.
@sarahjamielewis That ought to be expected. Every company I've worked for has had a policy when planning to migrate away from a vendor to not tell the vendor about it until the last moment if possible. Nobody wanted to give them the chance to do something we'd regret.
There were many media reports in Canada/around the world regarding the decline of sales of US alcohol / decline in trips to the US.
I know there is some hope in US circles that both those trends will be reversed in the coming years.
But I suspect that the economic fallout has only just started to surface e.g. we have invested months of work building relationships with local orgs / migrating systems etc.
Even if tomorrow is all sunshine and rainbows, it's unlikely to overcome the new inertia.
@sarahjamielewis Digital sovereignty may well become the current US regime’s most enduring legacy. The change unfolds slowly, almost unnoticed at first, but once nations begin to de-Americanize their digital infrastructure, there is no going back. What begins as adjustment eventually becomes the new normal.
President Epstein posted image of a map of Canada covered in an American Flag, last night. Venezuela was also covered in his AI picture, and Greenland.
@sarahjamielewis Rather like a person finally breaking out of a relationship that they had realised for some time was abusive but not inconvenient enough to motivate them to leave.
Only once they have left do they then realise just how bad things had been and what a weak and fundamentally compromised position they had been in.
Sales pitches such as "But darling, I have changed, give me one more chance, it will be different this time" will no longer work.
@sarahjamielewis the trust has been broken, it's hard to regain that as a people, and it will scar America, and Americans in turn, for a long time to come.
People don't like being stabbed in the back, and even if they aren't petty, the scale of what's happening in the US, and coming from the US, has changed a lot people's deeply held views about the US across the globe; nowhere more so than Canada
Narrator: Sunshine and rainbows never returned.
@alienghic @sarahjamielewis Rather like the sunlit uplands and unicorns promised by Brexit that never materialised...
@the_wub @alienghic @sarahjamielewis
And funded by the same billionaires.
@sarahjamielewis I am a US citizen, and I fully support your sensible economic actions. (Even more sensible, given this morning's news.) Trust, like glass & ceramics, is easily broken and difficult to mend. We have a *lot* of work to do in that regard. Perhaps, once that's done, re-consider doing business with the US. But in the meantime, elbows up!
@sarahjamielewis can we blame them? I think most of this community is fighting daily to circumvent all the NSA+ shenanigans. I've recently had to change my wire guard port, isp seems to be catching up to that front too 😔
