Having your own site on someone else's corporate service is no less of a risk of being shut out of your account. Free speech is only as free as the service you are using thinks it is.

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bigbadfeline 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

There's risk and then there's RISK. A corporate service in the form of a simple VPS is cheap and can be had from a 1000 providers anywhere in the world. Very simple to change providers too. Nothing like the quasi-monopoly of FB/X/YT.

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j45 4 days ago | parent [-]

VPS providers are many orders of magnitude simpler and smaller corporate services than social media companies.

Remotely trying to correlate or compare them defies any reasonable semblance of comparability.

You can mail your own server to a co-location service if you want to host the metal yourself.

If you need to go a step further and not rely on one host, it's inexpensive enough to get multiple hosts.

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ryandrake 4 days ago | parent [-]

And VPS providers are mostly interchangeable. If one of them goes crazy and starts using AI to randomly ban customers, just take all your toys over to the next one. At the end of the day it's just a commodity root shell.

	▲	j45 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It seems so obvious to those who know, and non-obvious to those who don't. I wonder how that bridge at least awareness wise can be improved.

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Zak 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Web hosting is, or can be a commodity. An organization that gets dropped by its web host can just get another.

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bestouff 4 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but as long as you own you domain name you're a DNS update away of moving it elsewhere.

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j45 4 days ago | parent [-]

As long as? I'm not sure if there's a common way, largely practiced by many people where they don't own their own domain name that they can point anywhere?

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toast0 4 days ago | parent [-]

It used to be common to let an outside agency run your website, and they may own the domain. It's probably still very common to manage your domain with your hosting company. If you get blacklisted by your hosting company, you may not be able to transfer your domain out.

	▲	j45 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		If someone built you a house and retained the master keys to the house that's more on the buyer being lead through the process more ethically.

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stronglikedan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think there's only that risk if you're using a website building service like Wix. If you build your own site and then send it up to a dumb host, you can just send it up to another dumb host when the first one pisses you off. Hopefully, you're at least managing your own DNS records too, and like that service.

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intended 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If cloudflare goes out of business, for example, their collapse would not count as an action against speech.

Conflating free speech with Terms of Services is to mix up MANY issues. There is a distinction that must be kept upheld, between private networks, and government power.

This does’t mean that the modern issue of free speech on privately owned platforms is magically solved, just that we need a more precise set of nouns, adjectives and verbs to frame the harms and limits that arise. Otherwise we simply get caught up in the simple between actual free speech and private rights.

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j45 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Web hosting is much, much, much more independent that posting on social media.

Social media is a web app and mobile app.

A website is just a website. Somehow being shut out of your own hosting is something else entirely.

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pdonis 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, it's much less of a risk, because companies that sell domain hosting services have an actual financial relationship with you and have much better support infrastructure in place because you're a paying customer. The risk is not zero--no risk is ever zero--but compared to your risk of Facebook doing something stupid and unwarranted and you being unable to get it fixed, the risk with a domain hosting company is pretty small.

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andyjohnson0 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If you have your own* domain and are reasonably diligent in keeping a local backup of your site then it is trivial to move the site to a new host. As others have aaid, web hosting is a commodity business.

* yes, I know...