How I Moved My Digital Stack to Europe
24 points by mpweiher
24 points by mpweiher
If you are going to selfhost your git repos, i recommend trying forgejo instead of gitlab. i got a gitlab instance running and its pretty wasteful when it comes to RAM and CPU. It takes 2GB for an instance where nothing is really going on. I also like that behind forgejo is a non-profit organisation.
Part of why the European switch works, at least from the outside, is that GDPR gives “European service” a concrete meaning: there is a shared legal baseline for what companies can do with your data. Without that, "hosted in Europe" would mostly just mean a server location.
I'm in Korea, so I keep wondering what the East Asian version of this would look like. Japan, Korea, and Taiwan are not wildly different from Europe on privacy law or public expectations around data, but there is nothing here that plays the EU's role. “East Asia-based” still sounds like geography, not a promise.
Korea has Naver Cloud and a few others, but moving from AWS to a local platform giant does not automatically feel like sovereignty. It can just move the lock-in closer to home. What I want, and have not really found in this region, is pretty boring: clear rules, usable developer tools, and enough scale to trust it for real projects.
FWIW, as a foreigner, EU law will give you significantly stronger protections than US law will. Honestly it's arguable that the GDPR gives stronger protections for US citizens than the US constitution and other US laws gives.
GDPR only regulates the storage and processing of personal data/ PII though.
What's also important (and I think more operationally relevant to a "european cloud") is a legal guarantee that governments will not snoop into private data. I forget the exact keywords but both the US and China have eavesdropping clauses on the companies within their jurisdiction.
Keyword for the US being CLOUD Act, which considers data stored in a European data center, but owned/operated by a US company on behalf of others (like a company in the EU), to be the US company's "business records", which they must be able to provide to the US government.
and yet even good old GDPR has plenty of internal bugs, e.g here in Sweden companies are allowed to store and sell personal data, without consent or right of withdrawal (I tried), because the courts have ruled that freedom of press takes priority over the right to be forgotten. NB companies that have nothing to do with press or journalism but in fact just monetize bulk data.
When I first clicked this article on the orange site, I got a Cloudflare error, which I found hilarious. Now, with Cloudflare working I can read why they chose to stay with the American CDN.
I wish they moved. It's another opportunity to remind people that CloudFlare protects ddos-for-hire companies and paying them is effectively throwing money at protection racket.