The author examined the distribution of instances in the fediverse. Given that many instances are hidden behind CDNs like Cloudflare or Fastly, the author employed ActivityPub’s functionality to discover the actual hosting locations of servers. More than half (51%) of the fediverse is hosted within a single hosting company. The author suggests that the fediverse hosted mostly with a few major providers, deviates from its initial objectives.
You’re correct; the focal point revolves around data ownership. However, you have to ask yourself, do we actually own the data?
Currently, four major hosting companies dominate the fediversum. Instance owners in practice do not have full control over the physical servers where their data is hosted.
Do you own the disks on which the data is hosted? No! The hosting companies retain that ownership and, can wipe the contents with a mere click.
A regular court order is all it takes, and I question whether every instance is backed up? While some may indeed have backups, they might reside on the very same server. Others, although having backups, may execute the process improperly. Additionally, there are those with partial backups, and the list goes on.
Those companies don’t own your backups and can’t stop you from moving your instance somewhere else. And if you don’t have a backup then it doesn’t matter if you are running your instance in a datacenter you built yourself because you can inadvertently wipe the contents with a mere click
A regular court order won’t be granted unless there’s very good reason.
And it won’t be issued to cloudflare to “delete everything that uses ActivityPub”, because that’s insane. And would require a bunch of manual engineering work.
And being distributed through cloudflare tells you nothing about where the files are stored. Because they’re a CDN.