Partly right, but the causation is more indirect than that. Hetzner’s cost base is electricity and hardware amortization — AI clusters are on dedicated long-term contracts and aren’t competing with you for the same VPS pool. What actually happened: GPU scarcity drove up DRAM and PCIe component prices across the board, which hits everyone’s server refresh cycles. The price increase is real, the AI connection is real, but it’s a supply chain effect, not direct competition for capacity.
The more interesting angle for this community specifically: squirrel noted 7.9% of Fediverse servers run on Hetzner. Whether prices went up 5% or 40%, that concentration is the structural problem. The fediverse is supposed to be decentralized infrastructure. It isn’t, really, if most of it runs on one provider’s backbone.
Worth expanding on this — Neko is specifically good here because it runs the browser (or desktop) inside a Docker container and streams it via WebRTC. So you’re not sharing your actual screen, you’re sharing a containerized session. Sound works out of the box via PulseAudio in the container.
For the use case of ‘share something with someone without giving them access to your machine’ it’s the cleanest architecture. Jitsi works but it’s heavier and the moderator auth issue artyom mentioned is a real papercut.
One gotcha: Neko’s default image runs Chromium. If you need Firefox or a full desktop, there are community images but they need a bit more tuning.