Jan Wildeboer šŸ˜·Feb 20

This is a link to an article written by someone else, not me:

"I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid."

https://www.coinerella.com/made-in-eu-it-was-harder-than-i-thought/

We need more stories like this being shared in the open. You can criticise some parts of the decisions made here, but that's not the point. Someone tried, learned and shares the result. *That's* the point.

#DigitalSovereignty #Cloudless

"Made in EU" - it was harder than I thought.

I tried building my startup entirely on European infrastructure. Here's the stack I landed on, what was harder than expected, and what you still can't avoid.

Coinerella
Show threadSimon Hewison
@jwildeboer very much depends how simple your system is and the external dependencies. I find that running my own email easier and less fiddling around than outsourcing that, self-hosting plain git is trivial, limiting use of AI to dedicated models in niche use cases rather than massive LLM means it's easier to host.
But then, I've had decades of application hosting and ISP experience so know the pitfalls.
Feb 20 at 3:03pmWeb
Show threadSimon HewisonFeb 20
@jwildeboer also, regarding keeping things simple. if your business model doesn't depend on third party ad placement on your pages or analytics then it makes GDPR a breeze, no cookie banners needed. That in itself is a huge sales conversion benefit if you don't need to interrupt the flow with unnecessary interruptions. #ux #gdpr
Show threadArneBabFeb 20

@zymurgic how do you make sure that gmail and other big providers accept your emails?

@jwildeboer

Show threadSimon HewisonFeb 20
@ArneBab @jwildeboer
1. Get your outbound IP address ranges from a reputable supplier, ie not lowest-common-denominator mass-market retail ISP. L2TP tunnel them to where your system is hosted from a reputable supplier if you have to.
2. Matching Forward/Reverse DNS.
3. DMARC, DKIM, SPF.
4. Never send anything unsolicited to anyone ever.
5. Only ever email existing customers about updates to their current services or their current orders.
6. Use a domain name that isn't new with good reputation.
Show threadArneBabFeb 20

@zymurgic thank you!

Iā€™m asking because I know that my old university had a lot of problems with that (sending a newsletter once a year about the yearly conference to a few thousand subscribers and making sure to actually reach them all).
@jwildeboer

Show threadJan Wildeboer šŸ˜·Feb 20
@ArneBab Have your SPF, DKIM, DMARC configured correctly. Configure TLS with Letsencrypt. Don't immediately start with blasting thousands of newsletters or other spammy looking stuff. Have your host and reverse DNS entries configured correctly. That's really all. @zymurgic
Show threadTobias FrechFeb 21
@jwildeboer @ArneBab @zymurgic can confirm, this works surprisingly well and there are tools to help you with setting it up, debugging and monitoring it.
Show threadSimon HewisonFeb 21
@TobiasFrech @jwildeboer @ArneBab I use #Exim , which 30 years ago was fantastically easy to set up compared to #sendmail . There's other mail transports that are even easier these days to setup with all the modern tweaks. I've heard good reports about #mailcow but I've not tried it myself.