Yes, that explains their methodology but not the location of the hardware. If I go and run a Lighthouse audit on localhost vs. a server in Philadelphia there's going to be an inherent difference.

I remember reading that they also ran the benchmark in Germany and got similar results when first reading about this here on hn.

Anyway, it suffice to use gitlab, github, bitbucket and sourcehub for a few seconds to notice the slowness of the three first sites compared to the last one.

We didn't really need the numbers to be convinced but I hope they will produce some pressure to be faster.

Sorry, I seemed to remember they did something to make it fair, I don't recall the location. I use sr.ht and I've used the others and, for me, it feels like 'turbo mode' compared to them. Especially git pushing: it's faster than pushing to my dokku server that only I use!