[thatloststudent]

I don't think it has anything to do with Germans or French people. Hetzner, Contabo and OVH are just popular (and cheap) providers to host bare metal instances, and they're not big tech. Those two reasons are probably why we're seeing a lot of them.

[charcircuit]

>and they're not big tech

The major cloud providers charge too much for bandwidth to make hosting a social media site there viable.

[b112]

No kidding! I live in a rural area, and have my own well with immense draw. The water is far better than bottled water.

AWS/cloud providers are like buying bottled water, instead of getting better stuff for effectively free. That's how cheap bandwidth is in reality. Free. AWS markup on bandwidth is insane. Immense. EG, 1 trillion times the cost, or some such.

(With AWS's size and scope, its peering capability, yes... 1 trillion times markup is likely conservative, for what they charge for bandwidth)

Most baremetal stuff is sold on the size of pipe, not on data transfer.

[Macha]

Nah, I think from being around privacy communities there is definitely at least a big German presence, and even in EU privacy regulation, Germans have played a part.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's law, I think it genuinely does come down to the Nazis and Gestapo and what those groups did with the information they had. Not saying that every German thinking about their privacy is thinking about that, but it does kind of de-fang the "nothing to hide" argument and that allows a bigger pro-privacy culture to develop.

At the same time there's some notable exceptions, such as their rules around impressums.

[smogcutter]

The Stasi, as well. I wonder if even within Germany there’s a difference in attitudes between east and west.

[Macha]

Ahh, I mixed up my oppressive German secret police forces, I meant the Stasi as the Gestapo were already covered under Nazis. (The fact that it happened twice though does help against "nothing to hide")

[thatloststudent]

I definitely feel a large German presence as a very active Matrix user, but Hetzner and Contabo are also some of the cheapest providers, so it just makes more logical sense to use their VPSes and bare metal servers.

[milvaed]

Same in France, Verdun is still in our conscience and "nothing to hide" is a very badly seen opinion. Probably less than in Germany but still.

[notatoad]

it might not be entirely german and french people running these fediverse servers, but don't think it's just a coincidence that if you want a good host for your indie web service your best choices are german or french companies.

[deely3]

can you elaborate please?