Thank you.

The problem isn’t that Meta and X and TikTok censor content…it never has been…that’s entirely within their rights, as businesses, to do.

The problem is that these 2-3 companies, run by 2-3 people with strong political allegiances and bottomless pocketbooks, control nearly every beer hall, Elks Lodge, KoC, and corner-grocer corkboard, in the world.

One of the biggest ways our government failed us was by letting these companies get so damn big and influencial.

The founders, while themselves wealthy slave-owning pieces of shit, did have some good ideas…but I don’t think they ever expected there to be just a couple of unelected private businessmen in charge of every soapbox in the country.

Oh, and also all of the press. Not them, but a different small handful of unelected private businessmen. Obviously they expected private ownership of the press. That’s somewhat of a necessity…but the level of consolidation is absurd.

I can tell your lieing, because your pants are on fire.

I think free cloud compute offerings are a bit different. Different motivations. They aren’t trying to harvest your data, they are trying to advertise their product.

They want sysadmins to play around and convince their bosses to buy in on Oracle. They want web devs to build demos and get their clients to host there. They want companies to get their feet wet risk free, before spending tens of thousands of dollars migrating existing workloads to them.

Harvesting data from those customers would be a scandal, and have massive negative repercussions.

And honestly, even with the announcement of Stargate and Oracle being a partner, I’d probably rather give them a couple dollars a month to run a couple small buckets than to give it to Amazon.

I can’t self host at home because no incoming IP. Unless I want to switch to my only other option, Xfinity. Which I don’t.

And…let’s face it…if the government wants to find me, they are going to find me. It doesn’t matter if my Bluesky PDS or my kids Minecraft server is hosted at home or up there. It’s tied to me either way.

I don’t work for Google. I’m but a voluntary product customer. But if they could offer me a way to get away from them, I’d gladly take it.

Right now I’m moving my personal domain over to cloudflare and email to mxroute. Considering setting up some calendar and similar groupware stuff on kubernetes on Oracles free tier as well.

That’s the other rub…if I want to cloud host anything, I get to choose between Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, and Alibaba. Wonderful selection we have there.

(I recognize there are smaller players out there like linode and ovh and a trillion VPS providers…only reason I’m considering Oracle is because they give so much free “forever”. And kubernetes is fun for me in like a jigsaw kind of way. Not like the puzzle but the guy from Saw)

Probably performs a good burn-in for them too.

Do people still do that? Used to be common practice to power on equipment and let it sit, either idle or full-tilt, for a couple days before even starting to configure it. Let the factory bugs scatter out.

I’m a pacifist hippy tech worker, and I would gladly draw a paycheck from Raytheon long before I even consider applying to Facebook or Twitter.

Raytheon is putting “more value into the world” than these shitheads.

Yeah I suppose. I came on to reddit early, before there even were subreddits, and comparing young Lemmy to an over-the-hill reddit isn’t a fair comparison.

Still feels like Lemmy tries to be a drop-in replacement for Reddit (sent from Boost for Lemmy), and it really can’t be until it sees much, much more growth.

The problem is community.

Lemmy doesn’t fill every hole that reddit filled. There are a lot of industry and hobby subs that just don’t have the audience here. Especially the more niche ones.

Shitposting and memes…yeah, we got that in spades. But that’s not what keeps people coming. You can get top-notch shitposts anywhere.

My subscribeds here are dead. I can’t find direct matches for communities I have in reddit, and I have no interest (let alone time) in modding one.