Yeah except you did talk about cost. Cost is not the issue here.

> surviving deplatforming is much more difficult than armchair orange website architects seem to acknowledge.

Somehow the internet is full of websites (some of which probably had much higher traffic) that did just fine though

I do agree with parent that this is an interesting political hypotheical though. There was so much media focus on Parler for a while and ultimately AWS was exonerated as the good guy in the mainstream narrative.

If Parler had self-hosted, would the potential wrath of the media just have turned to their upstream telco or whoever instead of AWS?

Colo facility or your transit provider doesn’t have a brand name it has to protect. You can look at gab, 4chan, tpb etc for counter examples. I’m actually fairly certain they would be fine on oracle, tencent or alibaba too

The Pirate Bay have managed.