Discussion

Migrating to the EU

sph: I'm also pretty much using 100% EU services except FastMail. Nothing against the Aussies, but I'd rather use something local, with servers within the EU.But I don't think there's anything as good as Fastmail this side of the pond, and I'm not prepared to compromise on this just yet. I might self-host email despite all the dangers the day FM decides to enshittify itself.

appstorelottery: I would add Hetzner for hosting. German based, solid in my experience with virtual servers.

sobiolite: I’m not with I could ever migrate away from Gmail, even if I wanted to. I have so many accounts and services linked to it.

sylens: It’s easier than you think when you stop trying to treat it as an all or nothing move and more of a gradual migration. Fastmail makes it really easy to keep the two in sync

antics9: https://tuta.com/ and Protonmail

fsflover: Set up the redirect and change the emails of your services one by one whenever you have a minute of time. It took a year for me, and I am free now.

ongy: I love fastmail, but I really wish they had servers close to me.The high ping kills the throughput on davfs and makes their website hosting a pain to update :(

I_am_tiberius: Codeberg is only for FOSS projects. Is there some good European hosting provider for git? I really don't want to self host git.

lynx97: Git is extremely easy to "self host". What makes things complicated are the web interfaces around code hosting, and all their supposedly important features. These days, Prs, issues, forums, wikis and all that seem to be synonymous with "git", which is pretty weird.

ktta: ProtonMail? Not strictly speaking EU, but atleast EEAIt also comes with a whole suite of software that you don't have to find EU alternatives for like Calendar, Drive, Password manager, etc

sph: I like privacy, but a service that's focused on maximum possible privacy for its users paints a target on its back for any three-letter agency, as it will attract a large contingent of unsavoury people.

yellowsir: https://mailcow.email/vps/

pschastain: How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review? Some EU courts will not exclude illegally obtained evidence either, so challenging the warrant later on will be pointless.Oh, and you might be in a reasonable EU country and still be hit with an EIO from one of the unreasonable countries. This is especially concerning given recent ECJ rulings increasingly directing courts in receiving nations to blindly defer to the requesting party when dealing with EAWs, EIOs and similar.Worth considering when hosting in the EU.

alpineman: At least there is still the rule of law and democracy in the EU

vertnerd: Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.

mvdwoord: I just onboarded and was dumbfounded that they do not allow for proper calendar exposure other than a fully public link! The claim of zero knowledge is super cute, for those that need it, but I need a provider which allows me to integrate the calendar elsewhere, as those will not magically move into Proton. I guess I am not in their target market.

brandrick: Proton ticks a few of those boxes for me. Mail, VPN, Cal.

heinrich5991: I've used https://migadu.com/ before. Not EU, but EEA (Switzerland).

andix: No system is perfect. It's more a theoretical risk for now, if you're not running a shady business.

josephg: Where abouts are you located?

mhitza: Took me a year of slow migration so that my essential emails and connected services don't go over Gmail. Email is the hardest to move because of its central nature as an online identity.

rapnie: Because there isn't really a good name. In FOSS circles the name "code forge" is often used, and then OP might say "git-based code forge" instead. But both Github and Gitlab don't consider themself (and aren't) code forges. The term doesn't carry the load of the product positioning. So "hosting provider for git" is a pretty good description imho.

vertnerd: If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.

deaux: https://bunny.net/ seems solid as a Cloudflare and S3 replacement. I'm not affiliated but they deserve more mentions in these threads.

ptsneves: Which is ironic because PR is definitely alien to git. There is no such git concept as a PR, nor git pr command.Coming from a pure git workflow in mailing lists where branches, and commits(and associated diff and git am metadata) are the unit of work, I struggled to adapt into the PR concept in the beginning.I liked to work with gerrit, where the unit of the review is the commit. This also ensured a nice little history and curation of the change set. The commit in github is not even in the main tab of the PR. It is like it is a second thought. Even in the review, reviewing by commit is awkward and discouraged.

_flux: There are the commands git request-pull and git send-email to work with that workflow, though.

p2detar: [delayed]

kace91: What do you mean by supposedly?The PR model is pretty much universal for a reason. I get why it is considered out of scope for core git, but it is by no means a weird fixation people have.

lynx97: Just send me an email with your branches URL, and I will pull from it. Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.

deaux: This isn't a downside against EU services when compared to the US, so what are you actually suggesting? Don't just vaguely hint at stuff. Should we be moving to Singaporean services? Oh shit, similar concerns there. Okay, where do you suggest we move? If you don't have any suggestions then there's little substance behind what you're saying.

pschastain: Is there really? Governments routinely go against the ECHR and the ECJ, and do nothing to rectify past violations when ruled against.On a national level, sure.

input_sh: Considering who we're comparing it to when discussing this topic: absolutely. Not even a question.

lynx97: I find it pretty ironical that people seem to want to move to Von der Leyens vision of the future. As a EU citizen, my trust in what recently has been going down is almost non-existant.

ralferoo: Nowadays, I primarily only use gmail because the mail client is good on Android. But all my accounts have been self-hosted for years now and gmail just reads them via POP3 (never managed to get it happy with IMAP for some reason) and sends via my own SMTP.Can anyone recommend actually decent and free Android (and also web) mail clients for self-hosted use? Everything I've tried so far (but to be fair, it was a few years ago when I last checked) just felt clunky compared to gmail, so I've ended up sticking with it as a client far longer than I probably should.

atoav: [delayed]

Rygian: Valid question, which must be put in the context of US-based providers willingly satisfying US out-of-jurisdiction search requests for EU data without even letting the EU know about it. (And when the providers are not willing, they can be forced by U.S. Cloud Act)https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/micro...

robertlagrant: I had no idea how cheap this was. Thanks.

_joel: You can take fastmail from my cold, dead hands :D About the only thing I can rely on to actually work.

debugnik: And yet the hardware had to stay all American brands, how sad we barely compete there.

wraptile: You can also get a refurbished thinkpad with Ryzen and 16gb of ram for 400€ or so on european Ebay.

robertlagrant: Also docs collaboration, and now video calling as well. And they've just bought Standard Notes, so that'll be next. It's definitely chugging along fast.

teekert: Uhm, is it? I have some small repos there, which are private and for my company (ie the website). I didn't encounter any warnings?Edit, it says indeed (right in your face on the front page):Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects, such as Git hosting.I just click... click opened a repo and set it as remote and boom. Never thought anything of it...

jagermo: Uberspace is solid and a lot of fun to try stuff out. For domains, i would also recommend inwx.com, they have been around for ages, good prices and no-fuzz admin stuff.

FinnKuhn: The author mentions using them as well, but I personally would have a really hard time trusting any service run by any individual and be it just in case something happens to them.

throw0101c: > How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?(IANAL.) This was reviewed by the courts themselves:> The CJEU confirmed that the Belgian, French and Swedish prosecutors were sufficiently independent from the executive to be able to issue EAWs. […]> […] Public prosecutors will qualify as an issuing judicial authority where two conditions are met: […]> 2. Second, public prosecutors must be in a position to act in an independent way, specifically with respect to the executive. The CJEU requires that the independence of public prosecutors be organised by a statutory framework and organisational rules that prevent the risk of prosecutors being subject to individual instructions by the executive (as was the case with the German prosecutor). Moreover, the framework must enable prosecutors to assess the necessity and proportionality of issuing an EAW. In the French prosecutor judgment, the CJEU specifically indicated that:* https://www.fairtrials.org/articles/legal-analysis/can-belgi...The question that the OP asks is fair enough, but there's a lot of subtly and 'low-level' details on how things operate compared to the high-level question that is being asked. Also depends on where the OP lives and what he's used to: common law (UK/US/CA/etc) and civil law procedures and laws are (AIUI) quite different.

hbbio: Still not accepting Codeberg moral stance.Yes, gitea (and originally gogs) are released under permissive licenses, so it's legally allowed to fork them.But forking complete working projects with years of work, rebranding with a "good guys" attitude, and progressively erasing the name/history (mentioning a gitea fork has moved down the faq now) is not fair.Edit: even worse, the word "fork" is not in the FAQ. It is "Comparison with Gitea" now (fork is mentioned on that page).

jen729w: > Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software…– https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/blob/main/LICENSEIf you don't want your software used like that, don't choose this licence.You can't post-hoc decide how people behave.

hvb2: And the discussion about that PR goes in an email chain too?You can pull, but having the back and forth documented along with the code is not a nice to have imho

ludvigk: I guess when the alternative is Trump's vision of the future ... - at least I know what I would choose.

surgical_fire: Generally comfortable.While the EIO is s controversial instrument (I particularly dislike the excessive power it gives to authorities in issuing countries and the inability to question the warrant), it at least is something that happens as part of a judicial process.I'm certainly more comfortable with it than being subject to the whims of the US government and its 3 letter agencies.That said, yeah, EIO in the shape it exists is bad.

dragochat: how about the OPPOSITE problem: _anyone knows of any non-EU AND non-US email providers_? with email accounts as the roots of trust for many things, i'd really wanna know how can I get a trustworthy one not-attached to eithern an unstable system (US), or a very overregulating one like the EU juristictions...and ofc, non-CN too

AndrewDucker: I am boggled by the number of people who see "I really don't want to X" and then reply with "Here's how to easily do X!"

shafyy: Yes, same here. I tried some EU providers like Mailbox, Tuta and Uberspace. In the end, even though Fastmail is not EU-based, at least it's based in Australia (and not US) and they have a solid track record as a company to make the right decisions and not chase every hype. So, this is good enough for me. For now.

sime2009: proton.me? That is in Switzerland, not the EU.

chairhairair: "This way, I can enjoy YouTube ad-free and without an account."Not having the gumption to actually give it up. Pathetic.

shafyy: I tried Uberspace for email and what bothered me that you can only set up one email domain per Asteroid. So if you have multiple domains, it gets expensive quickly... (depending on how many users per domain you have). But other than that, great company with a great ethical stance (and as far as I can tell, great technical infrastructure). I will definitely be going back to them if I need a simple VPS.

christophilus: I think Sourcehut is EU based now.

jasonvorhe: It's a team of 10+ people though.

s_dev: https://european-alternatives.eu/I recommend Scaleway for cloud hosting. I recently migrated from Digital Ocean who I really loved, to Scaleway and have I have to say impressed with both dashboard interface and pricing so far.In work we still use AWS but everything is hosted in eu-west (Ireland) in AWS EU Sovereign cloud but not sure how truly compliant this is in a CloudAct vs GDPR showdown.I've yet to migrate from namecheap but planning on moving my domains to inwx. My MacBook Pro will be hard to replace so that will be years away. Nothing phones look cool but I would like to go with EU solutions rather than British ones. https://commerce.jolla.com/products/jolla-phone-sep-ii-2026 looks cool but some the HackerNews guys have been quite critical so I'm still considering what those next devices will be.

cyanydeez: Guys, guys, I'm just vibe coding here; just give me your credentials and mothers maiden name and I'll get it myself.

perakojotgenije: https://mailbox.org/German e-mail service

NoboruWataya: Seconding this - reasonable pricing and I haven't had any issues at all with the service. I haven't used FastMail but most things I read suggest they are very similar in terms of what they offer so I would think Mailbox is a good EU alternative for someone who likes FastMail. (There are also other EU providers like Tuta but with slightly different trade-offs, ie, more emphasis on privacy but at the expense of IMAP/SMTP support.)

spiffyk: Not that it fits everyone, but that is basically how the Linux kernel is being developed.

dude250711: That ship had sailed long ago.

cyanydeez: gitlab ce is easy to host.

andix: Is there a good tool to automatically (and continuously) mirror all GitHub repositories to another provider? Something with GH API integration that also catches newly created projects/repos?Issues and PRs would be a bonus, but not a requirement in my case.

patcon: Haven't used it, but I've been intrigued by git-bug (stores issues in got itself) for years, to use as the issue/pr sync.Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked eitherhttps://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...

mytailorisrich: Trump will be gone in 2028 and policies may radically change depending on who replaces him. There is no change on the horizon in the EU when Von Der Leyen is replaced (she is just the current public face of the blob...)

olavgg: Gitea is one of the easiest projects to to self-host. And to do regular upgrades, you only need to update one file. It has been a joy to self-host for many years now.

dinowars: > First, I tried mailbox.org, which I can generally recommend without reservation. Unfortunately, you can’t send emails from any address on your own domain without a workaroundI use mailbox for a long time, one account for 2.50EUR/month with multiple custom domains and I can send emails from any address. To send from a different address the process didn't really seem different than other providers.From Thunderbird mobile on Android I just add a new sender identity. If I need to send from webmail, similarly I just add a new alternative sender. Are these the workarounds you mentioned?

AndyMcConachie: I also use mailbox.org and use my own domain for email. Not sure what issue the author ran into.

BrunoBernardino: For search, I'd suggest Ecosia [1] or Qwant [2] if you don't mind ads, or Uruky [3] if you don't want them (full disclosure, I've created Uruky with my wife).[1]: https://ecosia.org[2]: https://qwant.com[3]: https://uruky.com

mongol: Sweden is a country like this. It is just the way it is here. It can be abused, sure. But all things considered, I much rather have my things hosted here than in the US.

dragochat: ...also migrating AWAY from Fastmail (Australian) and TO an European provider sounds like a very bad idea - I'd kind of want both the US and the EU legally away from my coms at all costs (!)

severino: Is it that different? Being Australia in alliances like "Five Eyes" I don't think you can keep your stuff away from the US at least when using Fastmail.If you want both US & EU away from your data, I suppose you will have to consider things like Yandex Mail, which comes with its own set of problems too, of course :)

sakisv: While I agree in principle, I have to remind you (and to myself) that Australia is part of the Five Eyes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

pavlov: So where do you want to host your email?Name a country and it probably has its own problems: some combination of instability, corruption, authoritarian governments, collaboration with the US and EU governments that you want to escape…ProtonMail is in Switzerland, so it’s perhaps the best mainstream bet. But the Swiss are absolutely not immune to US and EU pressure.

lynx97: Isn't Proton planning to move to .de?

_pdp_: Our company started migrating our tech stack from USA to EU. We are about 90% there with a few small dependencies that could be resolved but we have not yet tackled.

flowerthoughts: Could you summarize the easy and hard aspects? Have you had any unexpected benefits or downsides?

petesergeant: For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.

dragochat: ...would those "overreach instinct" expand to "handing over access an overreaching and likely corrupt EU or US prosecutor"? (I don't care about 5eyes etc, spyies will spy me, I just don't want stuff to be easily and unexpectedly draggable in a court case, or am email used as bolt-key to access other things to get blocked by a prosecutor's regulation...)

thijsw: Yes, check out https://www.gitlabhost.com/ It is based in the Netherlands

eigenspace: I switched to mailbox recently and I'm finding it quite good. I set it up with a custom domain, and that did require a bit of fuzting around, but the friction there was almost all on the side of my VPS hosting service, not Mailbox's fault.

pjc50: Which cases are you talking about? Compliance with actual court rulings is pretty high.

realusername: Fastmail is australian

roelschroeven: But their servers are in the US.

lvales: This is something I've been trying to help people and companies with excipio (shameless plug). Data and digital sovereignty are fundamental nowadays.

bean469: > How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?The EU has 27 member states. Can you provide sources of this happening in each of the member states?

kvuj: Wouldn't source that this is happening in 1 of the member states be enough to raise alarms? Why do all of them need to for you to consider this an issue?

Jnr: You are correct, but integration with CI/CD and other services as a part of pull-request process in a modern platform is very convenient. I would not go back to e-mail. Especially since I can self host the whole platform like Gitea.

atmosx: Fastmails servers are in the US IIRC.

tonydav: For mail I've been using migadu.I self host most services: contacts, calendar, git, ..Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.Tried hetzner, but it wouldn't allow me to create an account. Ovh it is.I haven't thought about registrars, I don't think it matters for most tld. (Moniker, porkbun)

kace91: >Thats pretty much what a Pull Request is.Then you have to use email for the review conversation, make the discussion easily available to everyone involved and future devs, track manually which comment refers to which line of the diff due to lack of overlaying, manually ping to warn of updates, rely on manual quoting, no direct information on whether the CI pipeline succeeded...To me that feels like writing code using only sed. It is possible, but it removes or makes convoluted an absurd degree of regular work.

Jnr: I don't even update one file. I run it in docker with daily automatic container updates and it has been working fine without issues for years.

rafram: The baseline level of freedom of speech in the EU, in particular, is much, much worse than in the US. We’re talking about a group of countries with active, enforced blasphemy laws! Completely unthinkable for Americans.

noosphr: The police will of course decide if you are running a shady business.

rithdmc: Nintendo may also decide this.https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/uk-games-collector-raided-b...

kioleanu: The problem is that, even if Fastmail are Australian, they host exclusively in the US. They state that sure, there is the possibility of interference at the data center level, but they rely on their anti-hacking measures to prevent unlawful access

majoe: Had a self hosted nextcloud instance runnning on my homeserver, but migrated away two years ago to a Hetzner Storage share. All in all I'm quite happy with that.There are some downsides, though: - No support for collabora online, so no way for collaborative editing of office files - Data is not encrypted Hetzner also has classical web hosting offerings, which are cheap as well. I'm using that for email and a website of mine.

recroad: I use them too. Highly recommend. Have never had an issue with them.

pjc50: How much is this a practical rather than theoretical problem?One of the problems with being on the US Internet is that we get lots of coverage of US police overreach and much less coverage of EU police overreach. That could have one of three causes:- actual incidence is low- it's not being reported- it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourse(And the counter option: sometimes when you do hear about it, it's been laundered through weird US right-wing politics, like almost anything anyone says about Sweden)

pennaMan: > the EU currently has the most user-friendly laws when it comes to data protectionThis is laughable. The EU has the most big-tech regulatory capture friendly data laws that make it really hard for small companies to compete, nicely packaged under consumer protection pretenses.Those same laws give the institutions of the state complete and total right to silently wiretap the digital existence of anyone, at any time, for any reason.

ffsm8: If your threat model includes the USA government then you can only go with obscurity, honestly - preferably self hosted with a completely locked down system that cannot initiate any network communication besides on the relevant mail protocol ports, completely immutable filesystem beyond the mail data with encryption at restAnd with all of that they'll still be able to pwn you through network equipment which relays your mail, eg some router or switch which they backdoored and mirrors all traffic to their datacenter.

aktau: > Agree on mullvad, buy giftcard on amazon.I've heard this before. Is this just to add another hop in the chain to make it harder for someone to track the user down? Apart from someone needing to order Amazon to pony up the details ("Which credit card was this Amazon item bought with?")Is there another layer of privacy I'm missing?

nslsm: Von der Leyen has made it clear the values of the EU are exactly the same as those of the US: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEbQoT3Xlho

jdiaz97: open source is all fun and games until they fork you

layer8: The gift cards are sealed, and hence Amazon doesn’t know which gift card (which code printed on it) is sold to which customer.

kouunji: Honestly this is part of a macro trend of everyone outside the US scrambling to get off a US tech stack…these are going to be the longer term economic consequences for the country, as it is no longer seen as a safe option for any kind of data or service exposure.

roelschroeven: AFAICS the cheapest option is 250€/month. That seems geared towards businesses, not individuals.

layer8: My understanding is that the number of such sender aliases is limited, at most 50 or 250, depending on the plan. There are ways to use a custom domain for sending where you end up using a larger number of localparts fairly quickly, and it would be a hassle to have to manage them, instead of just typing whatever sender you want (or on replies, having the email client automatically use the address from the original email, without having to worry whether it’s still in the set of registered aliases).

v20: The limit is only enforced in the web interface. You can send from any alias using any third party email client, and on the website you can configure a catchall mailbox and create a rule to filter out the aliases that receive spam.

threethirtytwo: There's no point in switching. Most of these people are dealing with a threat that has an extremely low probability of happening. It is not in any practical way going to affect your life and for most of the people here busy switching to EU services they likely don't have any major example of where it has affect them or anyone one degree away from them.It's mostly an ideal. Like OSS. The practical reality means that such extreme adherence to only EU services doesn't do anything but make your life harder. It's like saying you only use open source, from the CPU to the GPU to your OS and everything else... make it all from open source, how big of a nightmare would that be? The only time it is practical is if you're doing really illegal shit and you need the data protection.

aborsy: Some of these European countries such as France are quite authoritarian. They frequently pass (update: propose/push for) laws to ban VPN and even social media, request access to private messages, etc. It seems to me the situation is equally bad in EU.

aleph_minus_one: > That could have one of three causes:> - actual incidence is low> - it's not being reported> - it is being reported, but doesn't generate discourseFourth possible cause:- the EU has 24 official languagesi.e. when it is reported, the number of people who are actually capable of understanding the reporting is only a fraction and localized.

squarefoot: Don't forget civil forfeiture, which can (an does) happen whether they think you're an enemy or not.https://ij.org/issues/private-property/civil-forfeiture/freq...

sylware: Slight detail: EU does not know how to design performant mobile/server/desktop CPUs (and GPUs). But they have ASML and "obsolete" foundries.

bluebarbet: You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.

pschastain: Yeah, but you also have Hungary who can decide to do things the same way they're done in Sweden and Finland.

raincole: The more I learn about EU's system the more I realize American exceptionalism is just stating facts.

lonelyasacloud: > For email and calendaring, Fastmail, although Her Majesty’s Australian government has strong overreach instincts.The Queen died of 8th September 2022.

s_dev: >How comfortable are you guys with the fact that EU countries allow prosecutors and sometimes even police officers to issue their own search warrants without meaningful judicial review?This is a hilarious 'just asking questions' concern that doesn't address the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianism while moving against the world order it primarily helped build post WWII while threatening other liberal democracies like Canada and Denmark with invasions.It's a complete false equivalence. ICE agents have straight up murdered two US citizens in broad daylight without consequence and you're querying the nature of some search warrants in the EU.

aleph_minus_one: > the complete 180 in direction the US is taking and descending in to authoritarianismA similar (though currently a little bit less marked) trend can also be observed for the EU and EU countries.