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Their funding is largely from the Mercers and possibly some from Russia.
But, they’re humped if they have to build out in cages. That’s going to be a lot of downtime, both getting it up and running and getting it stable. I’m an SRE with both datacenter and cloud experience, and if they only have AWS jockeys, they are fucked.
Getting hundreds of servers racked and wired takes months when you have an experienced, well organized team doing it. And that doesn’t even take into account sorting out inventory systems, IP allocation, figuring out how to manage DNS, playbooks for drive failures, alerting on all that.
AWS does so much for you, and even if they have ridiculous amounts of money to piss away, it’s hard to buy the expertise to pull this off.
They’ve probably outlived their usefulness [to their funders] anyway.
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I think it goes something like this: Because hate speech is good, free markets would naturally reward hate speech if not for oppressive, big government regulations like Section 230. If Section 230 were eliminated (along with big government in general), companies like Parler would thrive because of all of the hate speech, which is what free markets demand.
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My eyes actually crossed, trying to follow the twisty turns. Well done!
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I was supposing that yesterday’s interruption in service was the FBI hooking up to the AWS infrastructure of the parler servers.
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Oh god, its soo good…
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Simple: Trump is a God. To be against Trump is to be against God. What I want is good. And I get it all right now. What I don’t want is bad. And if you’re not just like me I get to kill you.
That’s what conservatives believe.
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Also according to Trumpers:
- Bakeries and other businesses should be able to discriminate against gay people, but no one should be allowed to discriminate against fascists.
- Healthcare isn’t a right, but Twitter is.
As others have mentioned, they need the scale that AWS provides, plus someone pointed out that they may have designed their site around AWS, in which case moving it would require re-architecting the whole thing, not just surviving the trauma of trying to set it up elsewhere.
I, on the other hand, am extremely pleased that you called it. 
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Oh but they will be toast, since the AWS backend is going down, and they can’t update the app to point to whatever new backend they stand up
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I was genuinely curious about @doctorow 's take on this. Pluralistic: 09 Jan 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
There are three posts: the first deals with Apple and Google’s insistence that they removed Parler because it lacked an effective hate-speech filter. Given that there is no such thing as an effective hate-speech filter, this is obvious bullshit. The WELL: State of the World 2021
The second addresses the fundamental problems of moderation at scale, where you are entrusting a large number of employees to enforce policies against "hate speech. The WELL: State of the World 2021
They should remove it, and tell users, “We removed Parler because we think it is a politically odious attempt to foment violence. Our judgment is subjective and may be wielded against others in future. If you don’t like our judgment, you shouldn’t use our app store.”
The WELL: State of the World 2021
I’m 100% OK with that: first, because it is honest; and second, because it invites the question, “How do we switch app stores?”
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This just precipitates the infinite regress of who decides which app stores we’re allowed to install
The '90s libertarian techno-utopia was not real and never will be real
We don’t need to see what happens when Rebekah Mercer starts her own App Store
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They are claiming 12h of downtime to get the site moved. I will believe it only after it happens.
I’m betting they try to fire everything up on Yandex and it’s a giant flustercluck.
Edit: Also. I love his suggestion that angry boomers who cannot figure out how to setup an account switch to a Linux phone. I’m about to do that and… it’s like carrying a Linux computer in your pocket. 
Edit 2: not sure what they expect to be able to release for a Linux phone either. Sure, anbox is a thing, but it isn’t a smooth user experience… Might as well suggest flashing a de-googled lineage image.
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Real talk; mere tech alone, no matter how advanced or cutting edge, will ever be able to solve detrimental social issues like apathy, avarice, greed, bigotry and/or fascism.
That’s the hard work we must do on our own, en masse; lest this poor excuse we have for a civilization cease to exist.
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Not sure if Yandex would risk hosting Parler.
Actions aimed at the incitement of hatred or enmity, as well as the humiliation of a person or group of persons on grounds of sex, race, nationality, language, origin, attitude to religion, as well as affiliation to any social group, committed publicly or with the use of media or information and telecommunication networks, including the network “Internet” shall be punished by a fine of 300,000 to 500,000 rubles or the salary or other income for a period of 2 to 3 years, or community service for a period of 1 year to four years, with disqualification to hold certain positions or engage in certain activities up to 3 years, or imprisonment for a term of 2 to 5 years.
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Not that I want to be any sort of accomplice for these awful, deluded, deranged people, but if they’re that stupid that they think an app’s essential to communicate amongst their fellows, they can do what they were doing before and stick with message boards.
OTOH, why in the name of god would anyone thing they have any sort of right to access app stores no matter the nature of the app?
Then again, we’re talking morons. And now that I think further, an app is stupid just to spread ignorance and worse. The whole matter is stupid.
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I suspect we are days, or maybe mere hours, away from media outlets claiming that the…curtailed response from security is what stopped this from being an even more deadly event.
Or has it happened already?
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If we were still looking for a headline for 2020, this might be it.
Yikes.
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Exactly this. A social media site needs scalable servers, fast databases, RDS, ElasticSearch or equivalent caching, guaranteed uptime and more. The domain is the easy part- fill out out a form and you’re done. People the think world runs on the Web, but the truth is the world runs on AWS, Azure, and Cloudflare. Nowadays the Web is a thin veneer on top of cloud services.
For anyone not familiar, you know how sometimes huge chunks of the web go down for no apparent reason? That’s because someone kicked the wrong cord at AWS Virginia us-east-1. Half the world runs out of that data center. Those cloud services own everything we do now. They are the secret tech monopolies.
Back on the main topic, so glad to see Parler being shown the door. As someone has to say in all these threads, I do worry about the power these tech companies have to pick winners and losers, but am grateful they are making the right choices in this brief moment in time (now let’s get back to antitrust actions on them plz k thx bye).
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They would if Putin blesses it.
Russian laws are generally stronger and more comprehensive than US laws. The trick is in the enforcement, which is more as a weapon against political enemies than as a general principle of rule of law.
I can see Putin okaying this as long as Parler remains English only, and the US right wing remains friendly towards Russia.
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