this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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I'm increasingly convinced that "The Cloud" is just a scam. Just keep your own files.
But the cloud is buying up all the memory and storage
It's been happening as long as the internet has existed. Most of us learned this lesson earlier in life when we lost files to geocities/homestead/imgbucket going belly up
I never have and never will trust "the cloud". If someone else is holding your data, it is no longer your data.
I pay for someone else to hold an encrypted backup of some data. The living data is in my server, they're just one of the backups in case there's a fire at my house or something. I pay because I expect legal liability from them to hold my data safely, no freemium shenanigans. And I encrypt because no one can be trusted not to mine my info for AI or sell my shit to a shady third party for profit.
I get a discount on OneDrive, making it the cheapest storage I can get, and it acts like this for me. Unfortunately the interface between Linux and OD leaves much to be desired.
No, the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
FTFY
They are not mutually exclusive.
It's someone else's scam?
Somone scam computer?
computer scam someone?
Someone else scamputer
Scamelse puter someone
Always has been. Bait and switch etc.
For specificity, and to be fair to small-fry private cloud vendors, there’s nothing inherently scammy about offering remote IT infrastructure for rent.
But it absolutely applies to the large hyperscaler cloud providers like MS, simply because enshittification is plan A, the optimal and preferred end game for any product described as a “platform.”
Why:
Platforms rely on network effects, the standout feature of which is that user acquisition directly scales platform valuation, customer retention, and competitive advantage all at the same time.
Once that market dominance is sufficient, you can squeeze customers with relative impunity, because your original competitors either went under or are too far behind to be a threat.
The rainmaking phase of enshittification is why VCs are willing to dump so much money into bootstrapping startups (to hasten their market dominance). It’s why many products and services everyone pays for now were once sold at a loss or even offered free of charge. And it’s why shareholders will keep shares of unprofitable companies for years or even decades.
Enshittification is the ultimate payoff of the platform model/scheme and has been from the beginning.
Sure, this small and mid-size services are just fine for backing up your data, and should surely be used as such. But using "cloud services" is nonsense. Too bad it has such good marketing.
So good i literally had a fucking CEO ask me "well what about this cloud thing?? Should we get rid of our citrix and use that??"