- Step 1: Don’t host in the USA
- Step 2: Don’t host in a USA puppet ally
Probably good advice but not exactly relevant. The person was hosting a server in their house and got raided for unrelated reasons and all their electronics were seized. Had they hosted in a data center or at least had off premises back ups, this wouldn’t have happened.
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.
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.
This is exactly why I only host on DefinitelyNotAHoneypot.sk. everyone knows that the CIA can’t run colo services in Slovakia.
As an American, feel free to just mute us. Watch the slow motion collapse from a distance.
I have dreamed about the ability to do this for so long. Cut US communications off and prohibit travel in/out. You can come out in 100 years when you’re ready to play nice.
Unfortunately, good old Uncle Sam may take offense at that, and his six-shooter contains somewhere on the order of a few thousand thermonuclear weapons, which he’s already used, twice. He’s also not afraid of ignoring national sovereignty and borders when it’s in his interests.
Not saying this is a good thing by any means, and sorry for raining on your parade, but the situation is what it is. Hopefully sometime in the next few decades, if not sooner, some kind of change for the better can be made. Who knows?
