The Second DI.Day: From iCloud to Jottacloud, from GitHub to Codeberg
The first Digital Independence Day was about email – switching away from Apple Mail and Gmail. The second was about files. Moving everything off iCloud and finding a new home, preferably somewhere in the EU and far from Big Tech.
Jottacloud
iCloud Files was genuinely the best file hosting service I've used. It always worked, it was simple, and the integration across my devices was seamless. Leaving it wasn't easy.
I evaluated quite a few alternatives – Nextcloud (both self-hosted and rented), Open Cloud, the file storage from mailbox.org, and Proton Files. None clicked. Either too feature-rich, or the setup was a nightmare, or too expensive. I almost reached the point where I thought about postponing the switch indefinitely.
Then I listened to an episode of the Techlounge Podcast where Don and Sascha discussed their own Big Tech exits. One recommendation was Jottacloud, a Norwegian company with a focused file hosting service. I signed up, and it stuck.
The pricing is reasonable – a family account with 1 TB costs €6.90 per month. More importantly, Jottacloud does one thing well: files. There's a sync service, a backup service, and an archive area. That separation of concerns is precisely what I wanted. Photo sync from iOS works. There's an AI-based image search with what they describe as a privacy-oriented architecture. And besides the desktop client, they offer a CLI that runs as a service – on my Mac and on my Ubuntu home server.
The CLI is where it gets interesting for me. It syncs my regular files between Mac and home server, backs up selected folders to the cloud, and I use it occasionally to update my e-book archive. It's fast, and it just works.
Codeberg
Shouldn't this have been obvious? I'm a member of the club that runs Codeberg. But in reality, I circled between GitHub, Codeberg, and Sourcehut for a while.
GitHub is where collaboration happens. Codeberg is focused entirely on open-source and requires you to think about where to host closed-source projects. Sourcehut seemed like an interesting, nerdy European alternative – they moved their platform to Europe too.
I settled on Codeberg for open-source projects and a private Forgejo instance on a VPS for everything else. Sourcehut was ruled out after reading some mixed reviews. GitHub is the Big Tech platform I wanted to leave – so why stay?
There are really only two reasons to remain on GitHub: the stars, or the easier collaboration. The latter kept me hesitating. You'll get more pull requests and issue reports on GitHub because everyone's already there. But for my low-volume projects? I decided that leaving Big Tech matters more to me. The only exception is django-tailwind-cli, which I contributed to django-commons – otherwise, that would have moved too.