this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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Whoever wrote this blog post missed the point in the way the fediverse is decentralised.
It's not about hosting. It's about ownership. And that means hosting can change at any moment. Because no one company decides anything.
That's why we really want the fediverse. Because it's not build for late stage capitalism and monopolies.
You're correct; the focal point revolves around data ownership. However, you have to ask yourself, do we actually own the data?
Currently, four major hosting companies dominate the fediversum. Instance owners in practice do not have full control over the physical servers where their data is hosted.
Do you own the disks on which the data is hosted? No! The hosting companies retain that ownership and, can wipe the contents with a mere click.
A regular court order is all it takes, and I question whether every instance is backed up? While some may indeed have backups, they might reside on the very same server. Others, although having backups, may execute the process improperly. Additionally, there are those with partial backups, and the list goes on.
OVH server owners learned their lesson not to keep their backups on the same hosting provider after the fire a few years ago. The only problem I had was actually getting OVH to give me a new server to restore my off-site backup to!
If you have backups independently of your hosting provider AND your domain isn't hosted with them. The worst they can do is take you down for the time it takes to get a new server elsewhere, restore your data and point your DNS (or CDN endpoint) to your new home.
If you're running a fediverse server and at the bare minimum don't have your database backed up somewhere, then the fault of any takedown is as much your fault as your hosting provider.
Mine is first backed up nightly to a server on another hosting provider, and that in turn is backed up to encrypted cloud backup.