The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.
Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?
Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.
The constant politics argument is tiring. Do you know the politics of the guy who made your favorite game? What about the guy who made your text editor? Or your browser? Or the software in your microwave? Or grew your food? Or the guy who made that song you like? What about the owner of the last convenience store you bought your mtdew from?
Even if the commentary is coming from an honest point of view and not just shitty astroturfing (and it very much isn't), it doesn't matter. If you don't like it, use an instance that's not run by them and who cares.
I'm paying Google for their enterprise gSuite which is still "unlimited", and using rclone's encrypted drive target to back up everything. Have a couple of scripts that make tarballs of each service's files, and do a full backup daily.
It's probably excessive, but nobody was ever mad about the fact they had too many backups if they needed them, so whatever.
That said, there's no particular requirement that a DMCA notice be sent to you even if you have a registered agent and some reporters will send it to the abuse contact for the IP netblock you're hosted on regardless of registration, so you may want to make sure you understand what steps your provider may or may not take when they get a DMCA notice before you actually get a notice.
One other option is the "Always Free" tier on Oracle Cloud. You get some potato EPYC instances and some Altera ARM ones that are quite nice.
There are people who have issues with their accounts getting banned with no recourse, but I've used OCI free for over a year with no issues (and run a Mastodon instance on some of the ARM stuff), and know a good number of people who have various services running on it with no issue long-term, so YMMV.
The price is right, though, and you should keep current backups regardless.
Funny, I was just having that discussion with someone.
I think the problem is all these platforms think the platform is the value and not the content made by the users.
And of course, since they have the best platform, it'd be inconceivable that anyone would ever leave because they're the best.
Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, and Twitch are all doing exactly the 'value is the platform' while taking a massive shit on the creators and users that made the platform have any value in the first place, then acting confused why people are angry about how they're behaving.
No actual human gives a crap about the platform: nobody goes to these sites to go to the site, they go there for the content from someone they like.
The real risk isn't really Meta, or Reddit, or whatever coming in and shitting on everything, but rather the same thing that happened on Reddit: upvote bots, bought and paid for mods, communities that get astroturfed by corporations with fake reviews/"questions" about if a cool new product is, in fact, cool/"hey i just found this thing!" posts and so on.
Those aren't as immediately obviously toxic as lemmy.facebook.com would be, but they're still a corrupting influence that degrades the experience for everyone, and they do it in a way that's less obvious to a lot of people because I mean, is it just a random person, or is it a paid-for shillbot?
Still, have to be careful of Meta federating their piles of users, but it's not really the risk that's likely to happen in the short term as much as "social media marketers" shitting things up the way they shit up everything they get anywhere near.