More reason to promote for self-host, and decentralised systems like smtp, matrix.org, ActivityPub. The idea of having all the data and server concentrated in a few player such as google, amazon, ccp is not reliable for the digital operation of the planet.

The question is: should we trust small, underfunded, hobbyist servers more than large corporations that have a money-driven reason to maintain high quality of services?

for the average end user: heck no.

for those with budgets to hire server administrators (or pay for third-party managed services)? yes.

second category includes almost anyone with a large following like institutional users.

hell the incumbent social media service operators can white-label their existing software and sell this as a service.

Not really many open source project such as nextcloud, mattermost are easy to host your self, or the hosting provider provide it as an app.

Yes. Like some sort of workspace? Google could make one. I wonder what they'd call it?

I’m sure Google wonders the same thing, given that it’s had like five different names over the years.

Disclaimer: am Googler.

Self-hosting is a good option, especially when mixed with multi-cloud offerings.

The big rub is that it's really hard to approach the same level of availability the cloud offerings already give you. Depending on work-load, self-hosting is typically more expensive.

This is why the SRE book talks about availability budget. You can't have 100% uptime, so how much do you want to pay to get close to it?

Except that Google services don't run within GCP, but apart from it (mostly on Borg I'd guess).

Their internal platform is likely analogous in terms of accumulating complexity (and a bit of cruft) over time though

If anyone else is curious, Borg is Google's cluster management software: https://kubernetes.io/blog/2015/04/borg-predecessor-to-kuber...

The above applies to cloud as understood by techies just as b2c cloud as understood by laypeople.