Hyperscalers and the Smolnet are Incompatible

Because running something small on something huge is a contradiction. Especially, because the smolnet is supposed to be an antidote to Big Tech and the concentration of power. And bigger tech than hyperscalers like Aamazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, or CloudFlare does not exist, if you ignore Meta for a moment.

So people running their Gemini capsule, Gopher hole, RSS feed catcher, or single-user Fediverse instance on one of those hyperscaler products, or hide it behind CloudFlare to mitigate traffic spikes or to keep their WordPress blog online, are not helping to establish a more diverse Internet. CloudFlare even wants to build a supercloud.

This also goes for upstarts like Netlify, Vercel, or the many others, who try to compete with Big Tech by giving away free hosting for static web sites. While convenient, it drowns possible income from smaller companies. The exact companies which could make a difference. The ones which provide jobs not in a single country, but in almost all countries, because they are local to those countries.

I’m no stranger to hosting with a big company. I used to host with GitHub Pages from 2017 to 2022, because it was easy and free, and I wanted to lose the burden of maintaining my own server. If I wouldn’t host a Gemini capsule on my tiny VPS, which GitHub Pages doesn’t support, I would probably still hosting there.

And personally, I would totally love to block all traffic from AWS, GCP, Azure, and CloudFlare. At least for my Gemini capsule. The off-chance of someone utilizing a big tech server to remotely log in in order to read their gemfeed subscriptions or browse the Gopher space is unlikely.