Comment by pjullrich
1 day 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!
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 :)
Thank you and I absolutely agree! Pushin is merely one building block. We need a European-centric push in many products.
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.
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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.
you have a ui that looks practically linear - i like it...
> 4. I say "we" but it's really only me (Peter Ullrich, peterullrich.com) and my dog (Bella, Labrador, beige).
I wish you the best, and I understand this might be necessary initially, but honestly I myself would never use a one man operation for anything I run in production.
Is GitHub really better? If you're a small project, you could always migrate to something else if this guy disappoints.
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?
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.
Awesome, tyvm!
[dead]
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.
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
Hi, awesome to see more forges!
A few questions if you don't mind:
1) Do you plan to open source the platform? If not, what's your reasoning?
2) You say that platform stability is one of your core goals. How does that look in practice? From what I gather you rely on Scaleway a lot.
3) What makes your platform stand out from e.g. codeberg.org?
Thank you in advance :)
Love your tech stack! Elixir and Phoenix will bring you lots of joy, it sure does for us ;)
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!
Do you have plans to publish the source code under an open-source license?
(sorry I got excited and shared it)
I am happy you did as I was looking for a European alternative
Interesting team, what does Bella bring to the table?
Mostly her toys which I should throw without first taking them. Only throw, no taking
I've heard enough, she deserves a promotion!
Having a dog is one of the best things someone working in tech (in anything?) can do. It changed my life.
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.
Indeed, where the hell Cyprus is? Or you think it is too Russified to trust anymore? Perhaps you have a point.
Who are you having this conversation with?
Love to hear more about the Git implementation. In using S3, are you going the walgit route or more like git-remote-s3?
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.
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.
In Europe people generally use “Europe” and the EU interchangeably.
I’m not sure many people would include Russia in Europe in normal speech, unless they were a geographer in which case Russia is partly “Europe” in some cases I think.
Even when the UK was part of the EU if someone in the UK said “Europe” they meant continental Europe and someone in continental Europe would be unlikely to mean the UK if they said Europe unless they were using “Europe” as a shorthand for the EU. When the UK was in the EU a United States American saying Europe would probably not not be including the UK in their mental model of Europe and, indeed [0], might not be very clear on what the UK actually is, because that’s confusing for the countries they agglomerate into “England” which might also include Ireland. A United States American saying “Europe” most likely means “Paris” and then maybe France, Italy, Spain or Greece but probably not Germany which is definitely the EU and everything that is wrong with the EU. But maybe Switzerland, because that very European.
As a European I’m not even sure where Serbia is, or if it’s even a real country [1]. I thought it was capital of Albania [2] . Or possibly a region of North Macedonia [3]
[0] only some of what I have said should be taken even part way seriously. Very little in fact
[1] Obviously being satirical here
[2,3] Also real countries, also European, but not necessarily “Europe” and definitely not EU. Yet.
> In Europe people generally use “Europe” and the EU interchangeably.
In Europe some people generally and incorrectly use "Europe" and the EU interchangeably. Europe existed far before the EU and will continue to exist after the EU finally comes to an end.
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« As a European I’m » – So what country do you hail from? I understand it's not Serbia. Just so this wild nonsense and wannabe satire can have proper geographic attribution. (Because despite there being a strong indidivual factor, the systems governing some countries do breed certain mental dispositions.)
> In Europe people generally use “Europe” and the EU interchangeably.
We do not.
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> In Europe people generally use “Europe” and the EU interchangeably.
I guess you don't wander out of your office in Brussels much.
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The FAQ seems clear on this
> Where is my code actually hosted?
> On bare-metal servers that we operate in Scaleway's Paris datacenters
That could change at any time. They could move to an Italy datacenter owned by a different company and that would be just fine.
But whether they're making a promise to stay in the EU specifically? Or whether they might expand to territories that aren't physically in Europe? That could matter, and the FAQ doesn't tell us.
(And yeah the line at the top says 100% EU but that's not the full picture.)
I hope they also have a backup outside Paris.
From the website:
"Your repos never leave the EU"
That's clear enough I think.
What exactly does “Bots are welcome” mean in value 02?
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.
How can I get invited to try it out?
+1
Good luck, aspecialy in the UE!
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.
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.
> 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.
Amazing. Now the next is how to get an invitation or find someone who has codes to share.
That's awesome. Thanks for working on this!
Thx for the info. Good luck with the project. There is most definitly a market for this, especially after the Codeberg activist takeover.
Thank you!
> 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.
Of course the Germans have a dog tax, how could they not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_licence#Germany
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!
"Everything" is in english. Are Ireland and Malta your primary markets?
And who exactly in European tech doesn't know English?
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.
Wenn du willst kann ich auch alles auf Deutsch schreiben aber dann versteht's keiner
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> 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?
"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
Those two words are not synonymous. But anycase you should be adding a tos and privacy policy on your website.
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