Yes, I know, it's dicey when people get used to a nice, friendly platform, and the platform gains lots of users, and then at some point (or several points), the terms start getting worse, and people feel misled and betrayed.

I get that. But this is a corporation. Hell, this is Microsoft. It's hilarious how many people think they've actually changed since their antitrust judgment in the 90s. I guess a lot of folks here are too young to remember it, even.

Companies exist to make money. If they are giving you something for free, they are either a) getting something else out of it already, or b) giving it to you for free now and looking for ways to get their own value out of it later. I don't mean that in some sort of cynical, "fuck the world" sense; that's just reality, and that's fine, for the most part.

If you don't like this, don't use free services provided by corporations. Host your own. Yes, I know it can cost money. Yes, I know it's more work. But that's life. TANSTAAFL.

I've had a VPS running for a couple decades on a small provider. These days it costs me a little under $200/year. Much cheaper options exist. I run a web server, gitea instance, matrix homeserver, and a slew of other things on it. It requires very little maintenance because I just run Debian stable on it, keep up with security updates, but otherwise leave it alone. It backs up the important stuff to S3 using duplicity, but -- knock on wood -- I've never had a catastrophic failure that required a restore in the ~20 years its been running.