EU
As I mentioned the other day, migrating to EU services is much harder than I thought. Creating the redirect rules was proving to be more complex than I anticipated, especially since I also have a website in Portuguese, which is now on a separate domain. Anyway, I would rather not waste your time with this massive can of worms. Long story short, I moved the website domain back to .com. At least it’s still hosted on an EU server.
Moving all the online services I use to the EU will definitely be much harder than I anticipated, for many reasons. So, I decided to take the small steps I can already deal with.
The Mastodon instance I regularly post to is already in Europe. As for #Obsidian, I run my own syncing service between my home and office. A few months ago, I moved my Supernote notes to a server in Europe. And because I was already working on the migration of my site back to Micro.blog, I decided to move it to a server in Europe and also switch the domain from .com to .eu.
In case you don’t know…
According to Wikipedia, “The
.comdomain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.”As for
.eu, it is “based on Regulation (EC) No 733/2002 and was launched in December 2005. EURid, a Belgian not-for-profit organisation, manages the.euTLD registry.” Source
I don’t believe small attitudes like this make any difference in the grand scheme of things, but they definitely make me feel better, and this matters a lot.
There’s no such thing as an uncomplicated subject in the #EU.
New euro banknotes spark Franco-Polish dispute over Marie Curie’s name
Will creators have to pay the price?
Apple’s App Store fees have the potential to make things harder for creators on Patreon.
As a shareholder, I understand that many of Apple’s decisions are driven by the need to make the company more valuable. But sometimes their policies go too far.
If the numbers presented in the video below are accurate, Patreon, the company, is unable to assume the App Store fees. I’ll even go as far as to say that it is mathematically impossible, as Patreon fees are lower than those of Apple. Which leaves two options: either the creator or the supporter will have to bear Apple fees.
I understand that Apple has a great system with almost zero friction, and that there are costs to operate it. What I don’t understand is the percentage. How can Patreon charge much less and even support all its operational expenses? Furthermore, does the amount charged by Apple even make sense when creators or supporters will be the ones paying for it?
My tiers on Patreon are pretty low because I’m not trying to explore anyone. I’m looking to build a community of people who are as passionate as I am and wish to help me by supporting my work. However, when Apple’s policies come into effect in the near future, I’ll have to switch to charging the App Store fee from the new supporters paying from there.
Apple, of course, is entitled to make its own business decisions, but forcing end users to pay more is unfair and, I dare say, unethical. Companies using the App Store should be allowed to explain that there’s a cheaper option to purchase a service. The way I see it, Apple is simply not giving users a choice.
This situation is another reminder that I have to keep my policy of not using any of Apple’s wall-gardened services, despite their quality. It’s also a good example of why the European Commission is constantly creating regulations to prevent big companies from doing whatever they want.
L'arbre des 3 Frontières
Thanks to the Schengen Agreement, I started my day in Luxembourg, visited France for a while, and then had lunch in Germany. The fact that anyone in the EU can freely cross borders is a wonderful thing that should never be taken for granted.
