Said nothing about hosting in China or Russia. The guy I was speaking to began monologuing about how he uses UBlock to disable all Russian and Chinese websites in the “Boycott US” community, I found it incredibly out-of-touch. Russia is not that hard to host in, you’ve clearly got an exaggerated idea of that. Where a website is actively hosted or what its domain is has little bearing on what languages it uses, as evidenced by the Malian domain basically being wordplay. Maybe I ought not to even mention it, but Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and a surprising number of places are solid VPS options, but I am not opening a community I just have bots and a few dozen oomphs in a group chat. Nothing I have been getting censored for on western social media is against their laws. I do not have issues on Rednote, VK or Weibo etc. Your side of the discussion is bordering on concern-trolling. I am not even interested in self-hosting a community ActivityPub instance or federating with the communities which are essentially BlueSky lite and use software that cripples essential tools such as searching within a profile and federated aggregation. Was honestly curious if it is as bad as FediMap makes it look or I had missed a spot in what appears to be another boring cluster of semi-personalized websites on the same old datacenters.
One way or another everyone hosting in the west is apparently still comfortable that laws won’t change (new issues will come and with them new censors) under their feet and they won’t get FISA attention. Worst thing another country’s internet host can do is terminate your account, or report you to your own LEO. There are just a zillion reasons why “which country is the most based to me” is not even the right question to be asking, rather: Where are we? Who wants to get to us? How could that change?
Singapore has a bunch on Fedimap, somehow more servers show up for me (on mobile) when you zoom in. They are English speaking which is in line with what I said. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have a handful too. Six Mastodon instances in Chile. The topic is non-US Mastodon hosts, so the discussion has been centered around where federated social media is hosted rather than the best place to hold a small online group chat (and your original reply was about posting to Mastodon).
Most people would rather not have to figure out a second set of rules when hosting, on a server halfway across the world, and having to pay currency exchange fees, and liase with a foreign company’s support page etc.etc. Each thing is a little bit of friction that makes people avoid that if they don’t need to. For having to go through the hurdles of hosting in a vastly different third country, what is it that you gain? Apparently I haven’t gotten a clear grasp of what you are averse to about hosting in Europe, Canada and similar, or if it’s just a matter that you want to take the road less trodden.
It’s the political culture of extreme paranoia, global domination, trying to ban encryption, sophisticated torture camps, IP insanity where they haul pirate site guys away for years, killed a guy over downloading academic papers off JSTOR, etcetera (no really, ETCETERA, it goes on and on) for me. You’re right about fedimap, I will see if there is more going on than I looked at last year. Plus, stuff like that and Fedidb is opt-in, which is why I was hoping there was more stuff lurking around. You’re right about friction but it’s easy for me to turn stuff like this into a game.
Said nothing about hosting in China or Russia. The guy I was speaking to began monologuing about how he uses UBlock to disable all Russian and Chinese websites in the “Boycott US” community, I found it incredibly out-of-touch. Russia is not that hard to host in, you’ve clearly got an exaggerated idea of that. Where a website is actively hosted or what its domain is has little bearing on what languages it uses, as evidenced by the Malian domain basically being wordplay. Maybe I ought not to even mention it, but Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Kyrgyzstan, and a surprising number of places are solid VPS options, but I am not opening a community I just have bots and a few dozen oomphs in a group chat. Nothing I have been getting censored for on western social media is against their laws. I do not have issues on Rednote, VK or Weibo etc. Your side of the discussion is bordering on concern-trolling. I am not even interested in self-hosting a community ActivityPub instance or federating with the communities which are essentially BlueSky lite and use software that cripples essential tools such as searching within a profile and federated aggregation. Was honestly curious if it is as bad as FediMap makes it look or I had missed a spot in what appears to be another boring cluster of semi-personalized websites on the same old datacenters.
One way or another everyone hosting in the west is apparently still comfortable that laws won’t change (new issues will come and with them new censors) under their feet and they won’t get FISA attention. Worst thing another country’s internet host can do is terminate your account, or report you to your own LEO. There are just a zillion reasons why “which country is the most based to me” is not even the right question to be asking, rather: Where are we? Who wants to get to us? How could that change?
Singapore has a bunch on Fedimap, somehow more servers show up for me (on mobile) when you zoom in. They are English speaking which is in line with what I said. China, Hong Kong and Taiwan have a handful too. Six Mastodon instances in Chile. The topic is non-US Mastodon hosts, so the discussion has been centered around where federated social media is hosted rather than the best place to hold a small online group chat (and your original reply was about posting to Mastodon).
Most people would rather not have to figure out a second set of rules when hosting, on a server halfway across the world, and having to pay currency exchange fees, and liase with a foreign company’s support page etc.etc. Each thing is a little bit of friction that makes people avoid that if they don’t need to. For having to go through the hurdles of hosting in a vastly different third country, what is it that you gain? Apparently I haven’t gotten a clear grasp of what you are averse to about hosting in Europe, Canada and similar, or if it’s just a matter that you want to take the road less trodden.
It’s the political culture of extreme paranoia, global domination, trying to ban encryption, sophisticated torture camps, IP insanity where they haul pirate site guys away for years, killed a guy over downloading academic papers off JSTOR, etcetera (no really, ETCETERA, it goes on and on) for me. You’re right about fedimap, I will see if there is more going on than I looked at last year. Plus, stuff like that and Fedidb is opt-in, which is why I was hoping there was more stuff lurking around. You’re right about friction but it’s easy for me to turn stuff like this into a game.