Is it just up-front cost? I understand that for larger instances because they’d have to setup heftier systems, but even micro-instances seem to rent cloud compute when they could probably get by with port-forwarding to an old laptop.
Edit: I understand that self-hosting is a skill that takes years to learn, and I’m aware that the vast majority of people on Earth choose to spend their time and energy investing into completely different topics. However, Lemmy tends to attract the techy type, so I suppose I just assumed the ratio of self-hosters-to-not would be higher. I’m not saying it’s trivial, just that I presume more Lemmings know how to do it than, say, Redditors (taking total users into account ofc)
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.