I’ll add - I struggled to find a cloud host that was actually competitive compared to game hosting companies. I went through a few before I settled on one that was so cheap I just couldn’t get close with running my own. My friends like to play with a lot of mods so we needed a decent chunk of RAM.

The only way I would get it to be viable from a financial standpoint was with cloud formation. I played around with it a bit but never ended up deploying - as I say - the host I settled on was so cheap it was just easier long term.

No worries! If you really want to save money take a look at the cloud formation (AWS) implementation of it. It would take some trial and error to find the parameters to best suit you and friends, but it uses spot pricing to take advantage of the cheapest hardware possible. It’s linked in the docs (but I always have to dig for it), so direct link is here https://github.com/vatertime/minecraft-spot-pricing

Check out the itzg docker Minecraft server build. Not sure if it’s exactly what you’re looking for but it makes hosting a server very easy if you’re familiar with docker

Intersting you bring that up copyright. I was looking at Peertube just earlier today and I was wondering how on earth some of the larger instances are dealing with copyright. There is no way they can watch every second of content that gets uploaded

I think you’re right though. Unless you get lucky/unlucky, its highly unlikely your instance is ever going to be used by many people, and therefore for most it’ll probably be a grey area.

If it did however, you need to not only “administer” that instance, both from a front and backend point of view, but there are also things like copyright to deal with.

Interesting read, thank you!

That definitely seems like it might be along the right lines - Though GDPR (rightly so) was designed to leave the power in the hands of the user/customer, you’re right, it doesn’t account for things like the fediverse. I wonder if something else put in the legal section would actually cover it