Here’s an AWS employee basically saying nobody can host a social media service without AWS or the like, and if you look for alternatives you have wrongspeak on your platform and shouldn’t find a host. Thoughts? https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/parlers-new-serverless-architecture/

He also uses "platform for nazis" and "need to scale to millions of users" in reference to the same hypothetical service looking for a home. Seems like a pessimistic view of the world.

@alan8325 The internet is very dependent on what are essentially edge caches these days, and while those are physically distributed around the world, they're administratively/economically highly centralized companies. That's not quite the point he's making. But it's the biggest issue.

It's certainly doable to host yourself. But it won't be as cheap/efficient as using a big cloud provider unless you're operating at a huge scale. Note how Twitter is switching to AWS...

@alan8325 The sad thing is fixing this problem isn't that hard: come up with a secure caching protocol that all ISPs can run, on an equal opportunity basis. It doesn't even need to be some fancy decentralized thing. Encrypted blobs would be enough.

But there's zero incentive for Google to implement support for that in Chrome, so...

@pete @alan8325 IPFS

@bitcoineagle @alan8325 Exactly!

This tech is out there. The challenge is getting adoption in mainstream browsers. Quite possibly an insurmountable challenge, as Google has negative incentives to do it... Maybe Apple would be willing to in Safari.

@pete @bitcoineagle Maybe it's surmountable if people use other browsers.

@alan8325 @bitcoineagle Problem is it's a chicken-and-egg thing: without a major browser implementing it, hard to get enough ISPs to run edge cache servers.

On a tech level, you could anycast the edge caches. But where is the money going to come from to pay the bills to run them while you wait for ISP adoption?