Parler may be especially hindered by its removal from app stores, and its loss of cloud hosting support from Amazon Web Services, which suspended the site due to failed policing of hate speech and violence

To the extent they took advantage of the services available on AWS, porting to another platform will take a major effort — and time. By the time they’re up again, wing nuts will likely have moved to a different social network, and network effects will close the opportunity for them. Here’s hoping Bongino and Mercer put a boatload of money into chasing that doomed rainbow.

That said, if you’re looking to host any kind of social network in ‘the cloud’, note that ‘the cloud’ is just someone else’s computers. Read the ToS before signing on — and don’t if you won’t keep to them. If you violate them, they can drop you in a flash — and you’ll have no contractual leg to stand on.

The First Amendment doesn’t apply here. It’s the government that’s barred from restricting speech, and if the government stepped in and required some cloud service to host your network (or demanded that some social network allow speech against their own ToS) then that government demand itself would be a violation of the first. Another way to think about this: what if the government demanded that a newspaper print a statement by the President?

Not a lawyer, just someone who’s read the Constitution (something we’d all ought to do).