eddythompson

Not sure how anyone can say “GPG” and “Works great” in the same sentence tbh. GPG is a usability nightmare except for the most advanced users who use it. Good luck trying to get your house contractor or doctor or representative or non-techie friends and family or really anyone to give you their “public key”

the best thing to do is to migrate by deleting your content from Reddit and moving it elsewhere

That’s not really realistic for the type of content that is Reddit. It’s not like blogs or videos or photos that the majority of people have on Reddit. Most people’s “content” on Reddit are bookmarks/links or comments in a discussion threads.

It doesn’t make sense to just re-share a dump of all the links you once shared on Reddit even if you have a list of them.

It also doesn’t make sense to re-share comments out of their discussion context else where.

I don’t disagree, but I think it’s a bit of an oversimplification to attribute it all to capital. There is a failure in how the original internet (and traditional FOSS for that matter) envisioned the world.

The original vision was that everything will be distributed. There are protocols, there are implementations, and there are “users”. Where the term “user” encapsulated everyone from the person developing/contributing/maintaining the code, the person deploying and operating it, all the way to the grandparent or child or otherwise absolutely non-technical end user.

The idea was sound. You are a technical user, you could run email server for a set of people you know. Others could do the same. Small companies could start offering paid services, etc.

But the devil is always in the details. Who is maintaining it? Who is keeping everything secure and updated? How does it scale? How frequently do you need to migrate everything because the operator is going out of business or has come down with health issues, or has died. How much trust do you have to put in every operator? People don’t want downtime. People don’t want frequent migrations. People don’t want to have to trust hundreds of small providers and have churn all the time in services they rely on for their day to day.

The rise of a centralized, large, and popular operators of each type of service is inevitable in that case. A couple of large email providers were always distant to happen. Same with storage, messaging, etc. It’s difficult to selfhost everything yourself, and it’s incredibly burdensome to do it for free for a large number of people.

Can someone explain to me what’s the point in having a lot of small instances of something like Lemmy?

I’m very familiar with Azure, and looking at the docker-compose file and AWS setup, it’s very straightforward to setup a simple instance on Azure container apps. How much it costs you will highly depend on what you want to do with it and how you expect it to be used.

Like, how much traffic are you expecting?