This weekend, I shared a small update about my homelab and gaming setup - a calm note on keeping things running, from Portainer to Prometheus. But I ended that post with a quiet goodbye to PayPal. A few people reached out asking why.
Here is the longer version.
Over the years, I have relied on American tools and platforms for everything from payments to infrastructure. Like many others, I admired the innovation - early PayPal, GitHub, Google, AWS. The U.S. positioned itself as a symbol of freedom, open internet, and privacy rights (at least in theory). It was the kind of digital landscape you wanted to build in. But something has changed.
This is not about tech anymore. It is about direction.
Elon Musk has turned once-promising platforms into playgrounds for misinformation and ego. Trump, back in the spotlight, is pushing rhetoric that openly undermines democracy, inclusion, and global cooperation. And all the while, companies once associated with innovation are doubling down on policies that are anything but humane. PayPal specifically has been at the centre of several stories involving unjust account freezes, lack of transparency, and heavy-handed control over users' funds. That is not a service I want to support anymore.
So yes. It is personal. It is political. And it is practical.
I have started cutting back on American service providers - not because I think Europe or anyone else is perfect, but because I want to align my digital life with my values. Less centralisation. More privacy. More open source. More sovereignty over my own data.
Goodbye PayPal. Hello alternatives.
Self-hosted whenever I can. European where it makes sense. Open source by default.
And yeah - still gaming on weekends.