Developers drop Vercel, call for boycott after CEO posts selfie with Netanyahu

https://www.middleeasteye.net/trending/developers-drop-vercel-call-boycott-after-ceo-posts-selfie-netanyahu

Cloud hosting platform Vercel is under fire after its CEO, Guillermo Rauch, shared a photo of a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday.

The image, which Rauch framed around discussions of AI education and “keeping our free societies ahead”, was immediately read as a political statement given Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

Within hours, developers and users across social media declared they were cancelling their Vercel subscriptions, deleting accounts, and migrating projects to competitors like Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, Fly.io, and Render.

477 points · 32 comments · view on lemmy.world

32 Comments

drmoose@lemmy.world · 58 pts · 335d (4 replies)

What an incredibly dumb thing to do. They deserve all of the backlash they're getting no matter how and why the selfie happened.

couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip · 16 pts · 335d

how and why the selfie happened.

If you mean he forgot to caption "about to put a haymaker through this guy´s dick" I doubt that´s the case here

0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 9 pts · 334d (2 replies)

For people, usually with empathy, it's dumb, for others this may be a call for business. And there isn't a shortage of people supporting the genocide. US literally had 2 genocide enablers for last president election. Rich people in US never shy away from the most unethical shit to make more money.

What do you think the military industrial complex has been doing since WWII?

drmoose@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 334d (1 reply)

How is this business? Dude literally lost a shit ton of customers.

Tm12@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 334d

Doesn’t have to be smart business.

moseschrute@lemmy.zip · 51 pts · 335d

Cloudflare pages has been very nice since I stopped using Vercel about a year ago. Netlify is also nice!

GenkiFeral@lemmy.ml · 49 pts · 335d (1 reply)

heart-warming. uplifting. sometimes i feel that i live in a world where "cash is king" and ego matters more than almost anything else.

thejml@sh.itjust.works · 24 pts · 335d

You do, "Cash is King" is why people canceling these things en masse makes a difference in the world... you make a difference in their bottom line.

My only regret is that I cant vote with my wallet against things I cant afford to buy in the first place.

herseycokguzelolacak@lemmy.ml · 46 pts · 334d

Name and shame: Guillermo Rauch is a genocide supporter.

ClassifiedPancake@discuss.tchncs.de · 22 pts · 334d

How out of touch do you have to be to post such a photo now?

boonhet@sopuli.xyz · 21 pts · 334d

How fucking thick do you have to be to post a selfie with Netanyahu if you're selling a platform for software engineers, notoriously a group of people at least somewhat educated, full of leftists (the entire open source movement could be considered communism) and terminally online.

Corelli_III@midwest.social · 12 pts · 334d (18 replies)

goddammit now i have to find another host

Zerush@lemmy.ml · 17 pts · 334d (16 replies)

Filen, NextCloud, pCloud, Internext, MEGA, Tresorit, IceDrive , all EU provider, currently using US providers is supporting Israel.

boaratio@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 334d (6 replies)

+1 for pCloud. I've been using them for years. Really great service.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 0 pts · 334d (5 replies)

-1 for pcloud. They support unencrypted storage.

lsjw96kxs@sh.itjust.works · 3 pts · 334d (1 reply)

Encrypt it yourself :)

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 2 pts · 334d

You just killed a whistleblower (due to human error).

Better to avoid that and only use services that can't accidentally take files unencrypted

eldavi@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 334d (1 reply)

are you required to use it unencrypted?

quick_snail@feddit.nl · -1 pts · 334d

No. But you are not required to use it encrypted. That's the problem.

Revan343@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 334d

So?

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 2 pts · 334d (4 replies)

Most of those provide unencrypted cloud storage. There's only a few you'd want to use

Zerush@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 334d (3 replies)

Wrong, all provide encrypted no knowledge storage, Internext even with Quantum encryption. Privacy protection is mandatory in the EU to be able to operate.

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 0 pts · 334d (2 replies)

What I said was that they provide unencrypted storage. It's possible, for example, to store something unencrypted on PCloud. It's not possible to do that on Mega.

Zerush@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 334d (1 reply)

I don't know, well AFAIK Filen in its free version (10GB) isn't encrypted, but why do you want an unencrypted storage?

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 1 pts · 334d

I'm saying we should avoid providers that offer unencrypted storage, like pcloud, filen, etc.

zaphod@sopuli.xyz · 1 pts · 334d (3 replies)

Do any of these even do what Vercel does?

Zerush@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 334d (2 replies)

Visit the homepages and look which features they have, normally similar in all cloud services. But for sure they don't have friendly meetings with Netanyahu

zaphod@sopuli.xyz · 5 pts · 334d (1 reply)

They all appear to be cloud storage. Vercel is a platform to host applications.

Zerush@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 334d

Also not a problem, there are also a lot of EU hosting services

https://www.techradar.com/best/eu-web-hosting

quick_snail@feddit.nl · 1 pts · 334d

What do they do?

dx1@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 334d

Can't imagine how someone thinks this is even a good business move. "Israel" gov doesn't need hobbyist grade quick deploy pipeline. A ton of the people who do will boycott.

geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml · 1 pts · 334d

This topic made a cameo into a Fireship video lol

https://youtu.be/hkSj-QapfZo