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Posted by sevenseacat 11 hours ago

Git hosting that never leaves Europe(pushin.eu)
237 points | 116 comments
pjullrich 9 hours ago|
Hi, Peter the Founder of Pushin.eu here. Sorry, the website escaped containment and landed on HN before I had the chance to update the "marketing materials" aka. landing page. So, here are a few points:

*The product is stable, but still in development. That's why some of the core things like pricing, etc. are missing. BUT:*

1. Business Model: Pushin will have subscriptions for individuals and teams. Pricing is not yet decided but it'll be close to GitHub/GitLab pricing.

2. Privacy: In true German fashion, we *don't* want your private data. Pushin doesn't track anything beyond the obvious: email, password hash, username, whatever information you put on your profile.

3. Roadmap: We're currently in Beta, but everything looks good so far. We'll probably go GA beginning of 2027. I'll focus on delivering the core features first and make sure that they are polished and of good quality before moving on to the nice-to-haves.

4. I say "we" but it's really only me (Peter Ullrich, peterullrich.com) and my dog (Bella, Labrador, beige). "We" are not VC funded, but bootstrapping on bare metal Scaleway servers. My wish is for this to become a proper company soon though.

5. Tech-stack: Elixir (Phoenix + LiveView) for most parts, Rust for the Git parts, S3-compatible buckets and Postgres on Scaleway, servers are bare metal Scaleway servers running in Paris.

6. Git implementation: Just like Tangled, I've used Rust and the gitoxide libraries to build a Git implementation that's fully compatible with the canonical Git CLI, but uses S3-compatible buckets as storage instead of keeping the entire repo on disk. I'll write in-depth about this soon, but it's very much what Tangled did, just with a different storage concept.

I gotta be honest that I'm both scared but also excited that Pushin hit HN. I wish we'd be better prepared, but here we are. Many thanks to anyone who is willing to try it out!

isodev 8 hours ago||
Hey Peter, that's a very cool idea. I think (digital) sovereignty doesn't just happen, it's something we need to build and that's how we do it. It's a bit like "local first". Looking forward to using it once it launches :)
pjullrich 8 hours ago||
Thank you and I absolutely agree! Pushin is merely one building block. We need a European-centric push in many products.
ivolimmen 7 hours ago||
Well as soon as your pricing is available and full onboarding is done, I will be pushing for it at work. We just left bitbucket and I have everything stored locally until we find an alternative and I just found it.
pjullrich 6 hours ago||
Oh wow! I'll start pushin (pun intended) to get this ready in time for you to switch then :)
biglyburrito 4 hours ago|||
Is there any type of email list I can subscribe to, to be informed of news/updates while (and even after) the site is in invite-only beta?
pjullrich 3 hours ago|||
You can sign-up and I'll invite you to a chat room I'll set up based on chatto.run very soon. That'll be my main outlet for news and announcements.
biglyburrito 1 hour ago||
Awesome, tyvm!
EuroTrash3 3 hours ago|||
[dead]
dadoum 4 hours ago|||
You seem to cite tangled a lot, and logically, I am wondering if you have any plan to also federalize on top of the AT protocol, so accounts could interact across the site boundary and also allow self hosting but still benefiting from pushin network? It may be hard in terms of design so I understand if you say you won't.
pjullrich 4 hours ago||
Yes! I’d love to provide private or at least personal firehoses to users maybe based on the same lexicons as Tangled uses so that you can sync your Pushin repo to your own Tangled knot. That’d be cool, no? Also, sign-in with your atmosphere account, and generally offering lexicon-based API output to make it easy to sync to Tangled or somewhere else
pksunkara 2 hours ago|||
How is this different from a custom forgejo hosted in europe? What features does this provide compared to traditional code forges?

Disclaimer: I am building https://juju.bi, therefore you don't need to answer if uncomfortable.

pierot 9 hours ago|||
Love your tech stack! Elixir and Phoenix will bring you lots of joy, it sure does for us ;)
pjullrich 9 hours ago||
It has brought me joy for almost 9 years now and I wouldn't trade it for the world! :) Glad that you enjoy it too!
emersion 2 hours ago|||
Do you have plans to publish the source code under an open-source license?
niag 2 hours ago|||
How can I get invited to try it out?
sevenseacat 9 hours ago|||
(sorry I got excited and shared it)
ivolimmen 7 hours ago||
I am happy you did as I was looking for a European alternative
layer8 3 hours ago|||
What exactly does “Bots are welcome” mean in value 02?
pjullrich 3 hours ago||
You're free to use the API from your LLMs or other automations and push LLM-generated code, but not blast maintainers with your slop-machine.
juujian 4 hours ago|||
Interesting team, what does Bella bring to the table?
pjullrich 4 hours ago||
Mostly her toys which I should throw without first taking them. Only throw, no taking
lexicality 8 hours ago|||
How did you choose which countries to include on your map? You have countries that aren't in the EU but are missing countries which are.
anovikov 8 hours ago||
Indeed, where the hell Cyprus is? Or you think it is too Russified to trust anymore? Perhaps you have a point.
dumpsterdiver 3 hours ago||
Who are you having this conversation with?
asgeirn 8 hours ago|||
Love to hear more about the Git implementation. In using S3, are you going the walgit route or more like git-remote-s3?
pjullrich 6 hours ago||
It's closer to walgit as it stores the packs in S3, but it uses Postgres for locking a repo during a push instead of using the Cursor/Walgit trick of using a WAL+CAS in S3. I've evaluated CAS on the Scaleway S3 service, but writing the WAL adds 240ms to every push, a cost we don't have with Postgres where it's a fast row lock. I also evaluated whether keeping a WAL would be useful, but ultimately decided against it because we can track everything the WAL tracks through the git history + audit logs without the write cost overhead.
einpoklum 2 hours ago|||
Your website seems to conflate "Europe" with the EU.

Can you clarify, here and on the website, whether the data remains:

* in _EU member state_ sovereign territory

* in _European states'_ sovereign territory

* on the contentinent of Europe

or some combination of the above?

I am specifically wondering about:

* Out-of-Europe territories of European states.

* UK, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Serbia etc.

steeleduncan 1 hour ago||
The FAQ seems clear on this

> Where is my code actually hosted?

> On bare-metal servers that we operate in Scaleway's Paris datacenters

gitowiec 9 hours ago|||
Good luck, aspecialy in the UE!
nerdalytics 9 hours ago|||
Congratulations! I'm hooked. The AI slop block is what I like to learn more about. The FAQ does not include AI slop. Can you elaborate a bit on it please.
pjullrich 8 hours ago||
I just added a new FAQ item for that, but I'll copy it here as well:

We plan to reduce low-quality contributions through several features, some already in place and others still to come. Invite-only registration helps us discourage low-quality accounts and confirm that new members are real people. Next, we plan to introduce a vouching system, similar to Tangled's, that lets contributors build a reputation. We'll combine that reputation with other signals to assess new pull requests and issues. Contributions that appear low quality will be clearly marked and de-emphasized, while maintainers will make the final decision. We also plan to limit how many pull requests and issues a new contributor can open in repositories they don't own. This will be an ongoing effort, but the goal is simple: maintainers stay in control of their queues.

Towaway69 7 hours ago|||
> We plan to reduce low-quality contributions

Ironic really because that was the original idea behind Git - to build a tree of trusted developers for the Linux kernel. Linus has those immediately below him that he trusts will push good quality code, and those folks do the same with their group of contributors.

> Invite-only registration helps us

If this is invite-only, then what you're doing is emulating the original strategy of Linus: only certain folks have commit rights. Extend that out to only certain folks have PR-creation rights and you're done. Maintainers select those that can contribute, these folks in-turn, select those that can contribute to the project, rinse and repeat.

Let everyone create issues and implicitly ignore these because any issue that doesn't make it passed the "acceptance level of a maintainer" will naturally be ignored and disappear. As is the case over at GH - issues naturally suffocate because no maintainer gives them air.

Perhaps have a special category "untrusted/toxic PRs" for contributors who don't belong in the tree of trust. These PRs are handled in a toxic-proof containment environment, i.e., they get particular vetting attentions by maintainers. Obviously this would be a path into the "tree of trust" for a project.

Then each project can also implicitly define what is "low quality" for their project - it's how they handle the "toxic PRs".

EDIT:

That's also why branching and forking is so cheap in Git: each sub-maintainer can maintain their own fork with it's branches before pushing up changes to the main fork. (Compare branching using RCS/CVS or Subversion to Git to get a feeling of "cheap" ;))

This can be done over at GH if a fork would be actively maintained by a sub-maintainer and every X days/weeks/months they would push the entire changes of the fork to the main repository. That would be closer to the Linux development strategy - as I understand it.

nerdalytics 1 hour ago||||
Amazing. Now the next is how to get an invitation or find someone who has codes to share.
p4bl0 8 hours ago|||
That's awesome. Thanks for working on this!
PeterStuer 9 hours ago|||
Thx for the info. Good luck with the project. There is most definitly a market for this, especially after the Codeberg activist takeover.
pjullrich 9 hours ago||
Thank you!
drivingmenuts 4 hours ago|||
> I say "we" but it's really only me (Peter Ullrich, peterullrich.com) and my dog (Bella, Labrador, beige)

Is there an EU law about a "dog tax" when you've mentioned the dog? Perhaps there should be.

Ps - I'm kidding. Mostly. I like dogs and cats. Frequently, more than people.

pjullrich 3 hours ago||
Even though we don't have a dog tax in Leiden, NL, where I live, Bella is certainly taxing being the 2yo Labrador pup that she is :D

- and I agree!

Super3000 9 hours ago|||
"Everything" is in english. Are Ireland and Malta your primary markets?
UpsideDownRide 7 hours ago|||
And who exactly in European tech doesn't know English?
surgical_fire 8 hours ago|||
Eh, English is the closest thing to a Lingua Franca in Europe, if you want to get as broad as possible.

Especially for a git service, something what would will be eminently used by software developers, who mostly can speak English anyway.

pjullrich 8 hours ago||
Wenn du willst kann ich auch alles auf Deutsch schreiben aber dann versteht's keiner
danielbln 4 hours ago|||
Na ja, "keiner" ist vielleicht etwas kurz gegriffen bei der nach Englisch am häufigst gesprochenen Sprache.
surgical_fire 8 hours ago|||
[flagged]
potato-peeler 9 hours ago||
> Pushin doesn't track anything beyond the obvious: email, password hash, username, whatever information you put on your profile

This seems poorly worded or genuinely concerning. Why do you want to track my email, username or anything in my profile. What do you do with it? How do you track it?

pjullrich 9 hours ago||
"Track" means "store" here and we need to store it for authentication (email+password hash) and to show your public profile (e.g. https://pushin.eu/pjullrich). So, regular things, not tracking you for data mining stuff
NotHowItWorks 3 hours ago|||
Track doesn’t mean store.

The word you are looking for is “collect”.

Saying you “track” implies you’re putting together a profile to be consumed in other services

potato-peeler 7 hours ago|||
Those two words are not synonymous. But anycase you should be adding a tos and privacy policy on your website.
okso 4 hours ago||
A few observations:

- Registrar: HOSTINGER operations, UAB, Lithuania. Hostinger-branded authoritative DNS servers run on Cloudflare’s network. This creates a dependency on a US company.

- IPv6 is not supported by the public website/Git endpoint.

- DNSSEC would be a great addition for security, especially due to the use of US-based Cloudflare and Let's Encrypt.

tambre 2 hours ago|
Lack of IPv6 is especially disappointing. Means you'll need IPv4 connectivity for your CI servers and other such infrastructure. :(
kmarc 3 hours ago||
As a daily user of bitbucket, gitlab, and github, it's refreshing to see how insanely, extremely snappy this web ui is.

I hope all the best to succeed with this project, I'm sold!

pjullrich 2 hours ago|
Thank you! I hope the key shortcuts help too! I took that inspiration from npmx.dev :)
graemep 9 hours ago||
Its specifically based in France. This matters as EU law is less uniform than US law (yes, like differences between states, but a lot more so).

The UI is a lot snappier than Github.

The promise not to train models on the code is not very useful for public repos, and I cannot see anything about private repos.

pjullrich 9 hours ago|
Yes, we can't block models from scraping the public repos and train on them, but *we* won't use your code (neither public nor private) to train models on them. We really only want to host your code and do that well.
msdz 4 hours ago|||
> we can't block models from scraping the public repos

FYI, there is the nuke option, which is generating endless nonsense pages as a form of “bot sink” [1] that ends the scraping relatively quickly, but IIRC that also tanks your search rankings, since it likely affects benign crawlers too – not something you’d necessarily want to happen to a new domain, unless you really need to protect server resources against aggressive hostile crawlers like SourceHut and so many others had to combat.

[1] https://www.toxsec.com/p/ai-tar-pits-are-drowning-llm-scrape...

NotHowItWorks 4 hours ago||
Facepalm
NotHowItWorks 4 hours ago|||
LLMs are read only.

A developer would be the one using the LLM to evaluate page response text and scraping what they need.

LLMs cannot “crawl pages” or “scrape” or do anything - it’s an offline archive with a few convenience methods.

xienze 2 hours ago||
> LLMs cannot “crawl pages” or “scrape” or do anything - it’s an offline archive with a few convenience methods.

Being a bit needlessly pedantic here. I think it's well understood in these circles that such models are being driven by agents, which absolutely can crawl and scrape. The only thing a human needs to do is write rules for the agent to follow.

azarai 11 hours ago||
Nice idea, zero trust signals. Don't even see company details or the folks behind and no legal pages.
pjullrich 9 hours ago||
Yes, sorry this escaped containment before I was able to update the landing page. Since the product is in invite-only beta still, I focused on the UX of the platform instead of the "marketing materials" aka. Landing page
azarai 9 hours ago||
Trust is not "marketing materials". Folks trust that you keep those promises, that their code ist safe. Your product is trust, not the application. Code and application are just the vehicle to deliver that.
pjullrich 8 hours ago|||
I'm very much aware of that and I've put all my effort into making the application trustworthy first. That means: Not a single byte must ever get lost. Since the website wasn't updated for the general public when it hit HN, these trust signals (e.g. privacy policy, ToS, info on business model) are/were missing. Sorry about that!
zbentley 32 minutes ago|||
You don’t have to have all of that material published and polished before you turn your website live. It literally is stuff that belongs on your marketing Wordpress static site or whatever.

If the founder had done a big b2b ad blitz without that stuff, sure, some griping might be warranted. But this isn’t that: some fledgling product website went viral-ish in HN and you’re complaining about the digital equivalent of the paint not being dry.

rapnie 9 hours ago||
So often when something launches, these are missing. And it always really surprises me. People apparently just sign up for such services, but I would want to know these details in advance before doing so.
jamwise 1 hour ago||
Feels like 2026 is the best time for non-US tech companies to grow. What a weird timeline we're in. Excited for our developments up here in Canada too :D
Aeolun 2 hours ago||
Ooh, here come the others. I'm sure there's more people working on this same thing. Probably mostly a matter of how ready we are to release something. Nice to see it coming out of the Netherlands though.

I think the hardest part about working on the same thing is to not immediately post it when you see other products in the same space pop up.

pautasso 9 hours ago||
https://codeberg.org/

also fits the description of "Git hosting that never leaves Europe".

imrehg 9 hours ago||
Regardless of that, these don't seen to play for the same audience.

Codeberg Terms of Use[^0] makes it clear that it's only for "projects covered by a licence for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works", and "You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools". They also only provide private repos where the FOSS system need it for their infra or what not, and not just for any purpose.

These are totally fine for Codeberg to do, and it's wonderful for FOSS!!

However it is not a viable place for many projects that are on GitHub/GitLab now and would want to migrate, say: any commercial project, that would need "permission-free" private repos, or when the teams want to decided themselves how much generative AI their developers should use, not their Git-hosting provider...

So yeah, different ballpark.

[0]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

VCFundedGenYer 1 hour ago||
Not a problem if you don't ask a robot to write code for you.
bsoqk 1 hour ago||
They also don’t allow code about cryptocurrencies.

They are strongly ideology-focused and it’s a matter of time they ban something you want to upload.

qznc 8 hours ago||
Codeberg seems to focus on OSS whereas pushin seems to focus on enterprise/commercial uses?
pjullrich 3 hours ago||
That’s right. There are plenty of good options for OSS but few to none focused on both, public and private especially with team/enterprise support. That’s why I created Pushin :) simply to have a place to store both my public and private repos but still retain a community which you dont get on a self-hosted solution
Super3000 10 hours ago||
I think this maybe needs some more time, to figure out what the actual plan with this is - if any.

The humour is there: https://pushin.eu/orgs/mctestface/members (Boaty Mac Boat Face ref mentioned)

pjullrich 9 hours ago|
Yes, that's my test organization :)
throwaway934876 9 hours ago|
Love it and will try to find a way to use it and pay for it.

That name though, does make me feel that somewhere in the stack is a tool called Gitler. Sorry!!

pjullrich 9 hours ago|
Thank you, but what? The name was meant like: `Push in (Europe)` hence, pushin.eu
Cu3PO42 7 hours ago|||
I didn't get that either until I read this comment. I read "pushin" as one word, figured it was a made up proper name for a product.

Once upon a time, I, too, had a domain where the TLD was part of the actual name and required to read it correctly (think something like foobar-pl.us). In my experience this left most people confused and I abandoned that quite quickly.

Towaway69 43 minutes ago||||
Any relation to Alexander Pushkin? ;)

He was also a European…

Synthetic7346 1 hour ago||||
I read it as "push in you" and was confused
whythismatters 4 hours ago|||
I read it, perhaps ironically, as colloquial/slang US English, like "lemme git to pushin' y'all!"
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