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  • Hacker News
  • Hey, thanks for reading and it's great to read your interesting discussions.

    Couple of things.

    The main reason to move my data to the EU is that I live in the EU and I don't want a few non-EU companies in an unstable political climate have control over it. It's too unpredictable and I rather support companies closer to my jurisdiction.

    I know the EU isn't perfect. And my stack is not 100% EU at the moment. I'm a pragmatist and just got down and transitioned the bulk of my services. Always room for improvement.

    Some good points: my domain is owned by the US. That's true, but no way around it I guess (I do own the .nl too though).

    I should dive deeper into using something else than GitHub / GitLab. Indeed maybe Codeberg / Forgejo.

    And Cloudflare proved not to be ideal today (thanks for the hug of death). I still think using Cloudflare is a problem data-wise, because it only handles public data, but I might look at BunnyCDN again to see if they have better limits.

    by monokai_nl
  • If anyone was annoyed by the site hijacking the mouse pointer, this rule works: "##:style(cursor: auto !important;)"
    by w4der
  • there is a button in the footer to turn it off.
    by whalesalad
  • there is also some janky, cheap feeling lenis-type of scrolling hijacking in place that gets disabled when the viewport is about the size of a phone.

    tried to disable it by turning off javascript and the page no longer loads - thus i am completely uninterested in reading this article

    by marcelox86
  • thank you. What an annoying site
    by 1234letshaveatw
  • > This website has been temporarily rate limited

    Feels a bit ironic... though this website is hosted on Cloudflare Workers so using an American company anyway?

    by vipshek
  • Yea I agree
    by brendanml
  • If ya read the article it lists cloudflare as one of the exceptions ;P
    by ktm5j
  • Cloudflare = NSA creation to get around HTTPS
    by Winblows11
  • Well this is nice. Apparently I reached some limits (thanks all), and had to pay Cloudflare more. Fair I guess, although some warning would've been nice. Tried multiple payment options multiple times just now and Cloudflare botched every time without giving me an error message. Finally managed to get it through on the 10th time. Please be gentle now :/
    by monokai_nl
  • Just a nitpick: 1Password is Canadian (still not European, but not us based, if that’s the issue). I do understand the choice to move all into proton though.

    Off topic: that’s a beautiful website

    by data-ottawa
  • Canadian counts as reliable for me ;)
    by guilhermesfc
  • 1Password also lets you pick where your data lives - US, Canada or EU. https://support.1password.com/regions/
    by james_pm
  • > dig ns https://monokai.com

    [..] > ;; AUTHORITY SECTION: com. 586 IN SOA a.gtld-servers.net. nstld.verisign-grs.com. 1778686176 1800 900 604800 900

    [..]

    Edit for those who don't get it: .com domains are fully dependent on the US.

    by chinathrow
  • Damn that is a very good point you make, thank you. I'm about to publish an app and had hosted the API on the .com domain, I'll flip that to the .nl domain
    by NietTim
  • One of the reasons why a lot of important websites have multiple TLDs.
    by andix
  • European-based alternative to github : https://codeberg.org/

    The hub for european alternatives : https://european-alternatives.eu/

    by BaudouinVH
  • The problem with that hub is that it is not being updated.

    I guess the founded had trouble coping with the big attention it got and was swamped with submissions.

    by jlundberg
  • Not quite, Codeberg is for FOSS only. A full alternative to GitHub is self-hosting Forgejo until a good commercial deployment of it appears.
    by debugnik
  • I don't think Codeberg wants to be a GitHub alternative. In particular, I don't think they want to support the use cases of someone hosting a bunch of private repos, or someone hosting commercialized code.
    by sufficientsoup
  • I'll preface this with a statement that as a European I want European alternatives to succeed, and MS-owned GitHub to shrivel and disappear.

    But in case anyone from Codeberg reads this, IMO landing and signup pages need a lot of improvements:

    > Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting (using Forgejo)

    OK, so do I register for Codeberg or Forgejo? Do I need to click through to Forgejo (it's a hyperlink)? Do I care it's Forgejo?

    "Software development, but free!" Free is the biggest selling point? Well GitHub is free too. WHY should I sign up?

    Why is there no signup email address on the homepage like GitHub?

    Why is the Register CTA off to the side, looking like a header instead of a button?

    Why no screenshots of the Codeberg (Forgejo?) UI / wowing me with features? (None on the Forgejo homepage either)

    Why is the signup behind that Anubis anime girl AND I need to enter a CAPTCHA after passing that?

    > Confirm Password

    That's extra friction and AIUI an outdated UI practice.

    > We are planning to drop the captcha by improving moderation and spam detection. (state: March 2025).

    OK...it's been over a year.

    > Using Codeberg to spread SEO spam, malware, links to IPTV services ("tvbox") or pirated content will result in an immediate ban with no prior warning.

    Too many words, pushing the "Register" button even further down. Just put it in the Terms of Service

    Just copy these things from GitHub, it's not that hard. Right now it looks like a conference registration landing page or something

    by gib444
  • Google Analytics --> Matomo

    Matomo charges 22 euros for 50k hits/month.[0] Basically, it's unusable for anything other than a hobby site - especially with the number of crawlers nowadays.

    If you self host for free, you're missing basically all of the good parts of web analytics such as funnel analysis as they lock all of those features being paid subs.

    [0]https://matomo.org/pricing/

    by aurareturn
  • i.e. you can't give stuff away for free if you aren't one of the 3 largest companies on the planet
    by basisword
  • All the good parts of web analytics doesn't amount to much anyway. Especially if you desire to have a usable site, which includes no cookie popups.
    by tjoff
  • Analytics should be self hosted. For any serious business there should never be a reason to use a SaaS product. For SME (including startups) obviously yes. But if you have devops teams then deploy on your own hardware.
    by radicalbyte
  • Or, to plug-in my own solution, you can self-host UXWizz[0], pay once, get all features and also receive support/help with setup/self-hosting and long-term maintenance.

    [0]: https://www.uxwizz.com/

    by XCSme
  • Umami isn't half bad self hosted. Been using it with Docker Compose for a few years now on a LEB and it's working great.
    by c16
  • I actually decided to self host analytics and generated a simple drop in google analytics replacement. People overthink these things. It's a very straightforward analytics API. And if you ingest the data in a good database or metrics engine (I used Elasticsearch), you can query it quite easily.

    In my case, my motivation was that I want to use LLMs to query the data with agents. This whole thing was surprisingly easy to setup and a positive thing is that you don't have a scary extra data controller doing shady things with the data.

    by jillesvangurp
  • Sorry for the self-promotion, just wanted to mention that I'm actively working on https://vemetric.com and will soon provide a self-hosted version as well. Maybe it's interesting for some of you :)
    by dsumer
  • While the EU currently offers more privacy than the US, the best solution would be to use services which no one could have any meaningful control over, as much as possible, except the user.

    Self-hosting (including object storage, backups, CDNs) is hard, but doable for some companies. For others it's life-and-death due to costs.

    Analytics should be kept at a minimum and should always be self-hosted.

    Email should die and be replaced with some E2EE solution. Matrix is far from perfect but if I were to make a website now, I would offer the choice of a Matrix address for account creation and comms. It's still federated and, while not offering 100% privacy, is much better than email, which offers none.

    Using a service for transactional email is something that shouldn't be required in an ideal world. That it is only shows how email is captured by a few big players who simply won't deliver your message even if you follow the best practices when setting up your server.

    Payment services shouldn't be required in an ideal world, either. They're needed because of a bunch of regulations and unnecessary complexities that could've been avoided and aren't needed from a technical POV.

    AI use is troublesome when a company is not using their self-hosted models. As a customer, I wouldn't want my data being shared to a US company or an EU one, although if I had to choose, I'd say EU would be the lesser evil.

    by Worf