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I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost. And even a simplified version of AWS sho

I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost. And even a simplified version of AWS shouldn’t be impossible to build that’s “good enough” [1] or another search engine that’s good enough (Google) and Google search sucks these days anyway. But Europe is not going to be able to replicate the ecosystem of Android like China did and definitely not Apple on the high end or MS for operating systems. [1] before anyone replies that I don’t understand the complexity of AWS, I have been working with AWS technologies exclusively for over 7 years including a former 3+ year stint at AWS.

lotsofpulp 1y ago
Meta subsidizes a very large proportion of the world’s communication (in the form of Whatsapp/Instagram/Facebook). Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  Except they make money so they don't subsidise it. They get paid for it but through our data. Which is what we don't want here in Europe anyway.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Subsidy in this context was meant to convey that all the bandwidth and infrastructure that allows for global communication for billions of people is paid for by the advertising Meta sells, money that obviously disappears if Meta disappears.
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly. If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  With RCS being widely adopted even by Apple, do you really need WhatsApp anymore?
wkat4242 1y ago
> I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost. Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then. I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones. But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.
dvtkrlbs 1y ago
What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.
- wkat4242 1y ago
  You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original. And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it). In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    Netflix as the canonical example would beg to differ as would Apple who hosts plenty of its services between AWS, GCP and I believe Azure. I only know first hand about AWS since Apple talked about it during ReInvent. There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
    - wkat4242 1y ago
      Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from. I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.

lotsofpulp 1y ago

Meta subsidizes a very large proportion of the world’s communication (in the form of Whatsapp/Instagram/Facebook). Even if 98% of it is unnecessary garbage, the functionality for that last 2% has provided a ton of utility to billions of people.

wkat4242 1y ago
Except they make money so they don't subsidise it. They get paid for it but through our data. Which is what we don't want here in Europe anyway.
- lotsofpulp 1y ago
  Subsidy in this context was meant to convey that all the bandwidth and infrastructure that allows for global communication for billions of people is paid for by the advertising Meta sells, money that obviously disappears if Meta disappears.
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    That doesn't mean we won't have money to pay for it though. All that advertiser money comes from the consumer too. Companies pay it to sell things, and to make a profit they factor it into the price. We're paying for it, we just don't pay Meta directly. If meta would disappear we would either buy less and have more money to pay for communication (and doing more towards saving the planet as well!). We'd probably choose things to buy more on actual need and quality rather than marketing BS.
scarface_74 1y ago
With RCS being widely adopted even by Apple, do you really need WhatsApp anymore?

wkat4242 1y ago

> I agree that no one needs Facebook and if it disappeared off of the face of the earth, nothing of value would be lost. Well yes and no. Facebook, no. The concept of facebook as it was when it was first released was an interesting one to me. Staying in touch with your friends, I've lived in several countries so I have friends all over the world. This is nice. However they perverted it when they dropped the old timeline and moved to the algorithmic feed. It became useless to me then. I do see a benefit to facebook-like services though, just ethical ones. But what I do like about facebook, or rather meta now, is the investment they have done in VR. It's still full of data collection I'm sure, but to me VR is a very interesting tech and it really needed that to get off the ground. Right now it's not really moving along because "AI" stole all the hype limelight but it will come again, just like AI has had some false starts itself.

dvtkrlbs 1y ago

What I am wondering is if the complexity of AWS is required for 99 percentile. There are a lot of niche services and duplicated ones on AWS and a targeted replacement for the most popular ones would be enough for most.

wkat4242 1y ago
You only require AWS if you build something to run on AWS. That's the thing. You can easily run it on something else, just build it for that specifically. Now, AWS-style services have become somewhat of an industry standard (e.g. S3 offered by countless operators). But still, I think offering AWS style services is a weakness because you can never become better than the original. And cloud is only really cost-effective when it comes to startups that have not much cash flow but expect/hope to explode rapidly by going viral. Cloud gives them that kind of infinite scaling and the ability to pay as they go (the uptick in clients will pay for the increased hosting when they do make it). In Europe this kind of business model is very rare though. We don't just spin stuff up like a weather balloon and hope it floats.
- scarface_74 1y ago
  Netflix as the canonical example would beg to differ as would Apple who hosts plenty of its services between AWS, GCP and I believe Azure. I only know first hand about AWS since Apple talked about it during ReInvent. There are plenty of large private corporations and governments who host on AWS. Maybe they didn’t do it naively?
  - wkat4242 1y ago
    Netflix mainly runs from caching boxes at ISPs though. Most of their content comes from there. AWS is way too expensive to serve all that content from. I see a lot of dumb implementations. At work we're picking up all our physical servers and moving them to AWS compute boxes that run 24/7. Purely statically, just because our idiot CIO wants to be a "cloud-driven company" so he can spout the buzzwords. We're spending a lot more money to get the same only on someone else's computers and get none of the actual benefits that cloud can offer.