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.

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.

Lemmy: please do no use the term “Chinese shills” as this is sinophobic.

Also Lemmy:

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?

If this happened, the first Americans to land in Paris in 100 years time would be greeted with “Privyet”.

How do we know it wasn’t needed? What were the charges?

So the reaction we should be having is to be careful whose instance you sign up for?

It wasn’t even taken down. The dude was raided probably because of some electronic crime, they took his electronics to get evidence. Completely reasonable.

On their backup hard drive happened to be a backup a mastodon instance, so by extension they got that too. The backed up data, not the server.

It’s not some nefarious collusion, it’s completely reasonable actions.

Now whether the backup should have been stored unencrypted on a hard drive at their house? Well that’s a server admin problem not an FBI issue, but the comments here come across like the FBI shouldn’t have done what they did.

But I’d argue that you should not store anything on Mastodon where it would be an issue if it became public. It’s basic 90s internet safety. We know that the data isn’t encrypted (the same for Lemmy), don’t go sharing passwords on a site designed for public sharing.