We’re in an exciting time for users who want to take back control from major platforms like Twitter and Facebook. However, this new environment comes with challenges and risks for user privacy, so we need to get it right and make sure networks like the Fediverse and Bluesky are mindful of past...
I thought one of the points of the fediverse was to not be centralized in data centers that are more easily controlled. It’s supposedly supposed to be easy and relatively cheap to spin up your own instance on your own hardware. Just outsourcing to a data center I think goes against what the fediverse promised.
Fediverse does not use magic. They are bound cabels and cpu.
In average any datacenter wil have a better connection to everywhere else.
I disagree.
It’s about control of the platform. A datacenter isn’t going to start making administrative decisions about the “business direction” of your instance. They can shut the server down, but so could a thunderstorm on a home server.
Even if the data center did (for whatever reason) administrate an instance, the idea of federation still holds because users get to decide if they like the decisions being made - regardless of who is making them.
Like anything, it’s a trade off. The fact that you can do whatever you want is the good thing. As long as everyone isn’t in the same datacenter, it’s fine. There’s datacenters all over the planet.
If you’re self hosting, you can mitigate the risks by having some kind of contingency plan though. Just having backups in another location would have made it possible to get back up after the interruption. Now, this instance is probably just screwed.
Data centers aren’t inherently bad and neither is self hosting. But there’s different risks that need to be planned for.
Like a degaussing loop hidden in the door frame?
Oh. Not that kind of contingency plan
I deeply enjoy that your mind has a rail for this train of thought to run on
Seems like a nice goal, but in the end aren’t you geographically limited to where ISP’s offer equivalent upstream bandwidth? Even then there are caps sometimes and other ways we still get controlled.