Back to the topic at hand, Parler dedicated itself to being a place where people could say alt-right things. How did they not price in the risk of getting booted by AWS? Even estimating a 5% chance should have convinced them to self-host.

Running a datacenter, especially at scale, is expensive as hell. Cloud is also expensive, but in return you get the ability to not need to think about hardware anymore. Prior to last week they probably assumed that AWS et. al. wouldn't have just suddenly cut them off, so they didn't factor in that risk except as a distant possibility. Up until a week ago we all were scared of FAATG's power after all and people were still talking about breaking them up.

I helped build one out, which was later acquired, but I wouldn't think it would take more than a couple of cages of equipment in a colo facility to host Parler, especially in these relatively early days. Maybe I'm completely out of touch.

Aside from it being sad that supporting free speech is controversial, if we assume good faith in the founders' statements then the controversy is simply the way the media has highlighted a section of the user base. Have you been on there? I haven't but I've been around long enough not to rely on the media for accurate representations of groups on the internet (or much else, to be honest.)

One of the founders of pirate bay had a tweetstorm recently where he was like, i get that aws kicked u guys off, but like, u guys cant get a homepage up and running? I agree with this guy.

parlor was founded with politics in mind, maybe they are ok with shutting down their community because in a way that serves their political goals, sounds like parlor and aws are already suing eachother, i dont doubt uber-conservative users will find an alternative platform to use in the coming weeks.