With all this GitHub hullabaloo, here's an extremely centralised service that no one is worried about yet:
DigitalOcean
I bet half the Fediverse is hosted on DigitalOcean droplets.
What would you do as an instance owner if Microsoft acquired it? Microsoft already owns Azure. DigitalOcean would complement it nicely by giving them a solid foothold in the Linux cloud space.
@debugninja The existence of alternatives doesn't make DigitalOcean any less dominant.
How deep do I want to go?
Twitter: There is only one Twitter, but hey, we've all got separate accounts.
Mastodon: A significant portion of the Fediverse is hosted with DigitalOcean, but hey, we've all got separate VMs.
The Internet permits us to spread out, but we are social animals who like to bunch together. This isn't optimal...
@thor I honestly don't care about ownership. Microsoft made a $7 billion investment and I seriously doubt they'd want to fuck that up. I'm cautious but after seeing how well their acquisition of mojang went, I'm a little optimistic.
@abby They didn't do great with Skype, though...
@thor to be fair that Skype fiasco was older and completely under old management
@thor
Nope, a lot of instances are josted on OVH, some are hosted on Vultr, others are hosted on AWS (a lot use S3 as media storage),…
That's far away from being centralized.
Also the probably more important part is that these services have no power over you.
So when you own a domain and can freely decide which servers you use behind, it's no problem.
Way more centralized is Let's encrypt which for sure provides most TLS certificates. Paired with HSTS this can become deadly.
@rixx @thor here are these numbers again and I'm currently running a few scripts to get the current numbers: https://drop.leah.is/kYXmJJmy They are far away from a 50% position but are one of the three biggest hosters of mastodon instances.
@thor Migrate more stuff to my racks in New York or Iceland.
@thor is the ease of DigitalOcean provided by other hosting providers? If so, is there a common FOSS software that hosting providers will use to make that experience consistent between each other?
Cause that’s what’ll take to break that dependence.
I should come across which ever host I want. Pay for it. Request a Mastodon/git/etc server at the click of a button. Boom! Done.
Then I could scale my resources or remote into the server if I want more control.
@thor the only way we can break centralization is if the FOSS community creates platforms that provide a convenience that can compete with these companies
@thor I actually run on my Azure MSDN monthly credit...
So there's that.
Fighting the man with the man's own money so to speak.
@thor There are literally hundreds of alternatives though. It also doesn’t matter much. Even if you own your own servers who owns your data centers etc.. how deep do you want to go