I get that everyone just wants to shit on Parler, but AFAIK they didn't host any content that wasn't present in far greater quantity on Facebook and Twitter. It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.

However, given the predictable circumstances they might be in , they should at least expect every cloud provider to pull the plug at them, and should have gone the route of self-hosting. Instead, they have created a social media website out of Wordpress (out of all things), that performs ridiculously slow and eats up all of their maintenance budget, on AWS. It’s baffling how the right populists cannot find or hire any competent engineers; heck, on the leftist side people do far better with much less money (for example, look at Extinction Rebellion, where they manage to self-host their entire communications system: https://media.ccc.de/v/36c3-11008-server_infrastructure_for_...)

I'm baffled by their choice of WordPress. No wonder they need so many servers.

I don't understand why they should have expected everyone to deplatform them. Facebook hosts the same content in far greater quantity and has clearly demonstrated that they can't moderate effectively, but there's no bulls-eye on them over that. What's different about Parler besides the ownership?

> What's different about Parler besides the ownership?

Facebook is 233x larger, profitable, and self-hosting - they don't have to keep their cloud service provider happy.

Parler was dependent on AWS for services but didn't comply with their terms.

Depends on who you ask. I would be delighted to see a bulls-eye on Facebook for their complicity in what's been going on. I don't see them as significantly better in moral terms than Parler, and Facebook's body count for willingly collaborating with seditionists and genocide instigators is WAY WAY higher than Parler's.

Facebook is bigger, and has power.

That means that (a) they're harder to attack, and (b) they have purposes beyond ONLY fomenting insurrection and genocide. That means they'll operate in more of a gray area by intention, and will in fact try to self-moderate when the cost of fomenting insurrection and genocide risks becoming more expensive than the profit (ideological OR financial) for fomenting insurrection and genocide.

The difference between Parler and Facebook is, Facebook will take your money but then throw you under the bus if you're malicious and endangering their platform. Parler went down with the ship because it was more important to them than just taking the money.

As a proportion of the total amount of content, Parler is/was vastly more violent and hateful than either of those platforms.

And in any case, they own their own DC's.

The difference here is both your examples have their own DCs ;)

> It would have been reasonable to expect to have access to the same platforms as those companies.

Wait, which of those companies is using the publicly offered terms of any public cloud vendor?

You're right, they don't. We don't know what Twitter's contract with AWS says, but it's likely that Twitter doesn't have to play by the same rules as their much smaller competitors.

You mean building out their own datacentres?

Obviously not. They contract with cloud providers as well.

Proper planning would have been what, coloing hundreds of servers worth millions of dollars as a DR plan? And having no guarantee that the colo provider wouldn't also deplatform them?

Oh please. Colo those servers and don’t publicly expose your relationship with the colo provider, spin up frontend proxies on other providers to hide your backend.

This is basic stuff, the problem with Parler is that their team seems to have no experience hosting controversial content.

How much do you think their aws bill was per month for hundreds of servers? Their traffic bill alone was probably worth it already. Don’t contract this work to ibm or deloitte or something and you’ll be fine

I'm not talking about cost. I'm saying that surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Yeah except you did talk about cost. Cost is not the issue here.

> surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though

I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative.

If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

Colo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too

The Pirate Bay have managed.

lasagnaphil's comment provides some insight that proper planning would have involved not using WordPress and thus needing a fraction of the servers.