“Like Reddit, but owned by the people”

It has, and I’ve been told “it’s a fluke” or “it’s not worth the effort”, followed by them freaking out with us being down and all the money we’re losing and what can we do about it.

My former company wouldn’t let me rearchitect our apps to be regionally redundant because “the cloud never goes down”. All their stuff is in us-east-1… wonder how they’re doing!

I am curious how far you take that. Do you compile your own compiler? Do you have an open BIOS that you can truly audit. Do you know about every piece of firmware on your system and have you been able to audit that code too? Hell, let’s take it to its logical conclusion, how do you know nothing is actually embedded in the silicon? All of that could be malware and do every single thing you mentioned. At some point you either have to trust something (but who do you trust) or build it all yourself from scratch.

Just note, this is the extreme interpretation of software in general (“if you don’t compile the compiler by hand it could insert a back door!”)

For the purpose of your question, as others have stated you can run things isolated on your network with local accounts and not use their remote services (incidentally that’s how I run it)

As always there’s an xkcd for it.

I was troubleshooting why an upgrade from 10Mb Cards to 100Mb cards wasn’t working for a group of users. Tracing the lines and come to find out the existing lines were Cat-3…. that suddenly got splice in to a 50-pair telco bundle at a 66 block. Worked perfectly fine for 10Mb, not so much for anything faster.