I think free cloud compute offerings are a bit different. Different motivations. They aren’t trying to harvest your data, they are trying to advertise their product.

They want sysadmins to play around and convince their bosses to buy in on Oracle. They want web devs to build demos and get their clients to host there. They want companies to get their feet wet risk free, before spending tens of thousands of dollars migrating existing workloads to them.

Harvesting data from those customers would be a scandal, and have massive negative repercussions.

And honestly, even with the announcement of Stargate and Oracle being a partner, I’d probably rather give them a couple dollars a month to run a couple small buckets than to give it to Amazon.

I can’t self host at home because no incoming IP. Unless I want to switch to my only other option, Xfinity. Which I don’t.

And…let’s face it…if the government wants to find me, they are going to find me. It doesn’t matter if my Bluesky PDS or my kids Minecraft server is hosted at home or up there. It’s tied to me either way.