Legally? I'm not sure.

But if I had to explain to a jury, I'd sure rather have "the social media site's server was in a data centre and hosted user content" as the explanation instead of trying to explain to laypeople "yes the material was on a computer in my house but akshully a computer and a server are the same thing, and there's this concept among people online about hosting your own internet services" and so on.

...Of course.

@sam@r1b.it I think a lot of it boils down to knowledge. You'd be surprised by the amount of people who need their hands held the first time they buy a domain name, who have never so much as paid for a subscription to a managed service before.

It's easy to take for granted the technical abilities that are necessary to self-host an instance. None of it is exactly difficult, but it's time-consuming and requires a lot of specific knowledge.

Who on earth starts a thread and doesn't put in a single reply?

I agree with pretty much everything people are saying, at least that which is kind. I think I probably just overcorrected when trying to account for the fact that Lemmy tends to bring in the techy type. My thought process was flawed. I don't have much to say beyond that and an updoot, which I've been giving to most

Also, the edit to the post was intended as a mass reply. A lot of people are saying the same thing, so I didn't want to reply to each individual one, nor did I want to come off as argumentative. Like I said, I agree with what most are saying

I appreciate you being as kind as you are in response to a half thought-out thought posted sporadically onto the internet. You're giving me too much care, lol

I simply just can’t afford a server to actually run it currently.

Fair