I recently came across a video by Loyal Moses titled “They’re Banning Your Home Server”.
This got me thinking about what it means for anyone who likes running their own gear.
The industry lobby’s framing around private servers feels like a major mask-off moment for big tech, treating user-controlled hardware as a threat.
I have written a short piece in reaction to the video and would love to hear your thoughts.
Original content by The Unknown Universe, written by a human and not AI generated!
Doesn’t Minecraft explicitly support hosting game servers?
I thought that was the whole point of Minecraft
I have a feeling Microsoft has been itching to shut down the Java edition since they acquired it. They just know how much publicly comes from content based on the Java edition.
For sure.
Streamers and content creators all use Java.
Those creators are the very reason Minecraft gets as much reach as it does.
If it wasn’t for them, Java would be long dead and the game would be stuffed with microtransactions.
As a long-time player and Java server operator, all I can say is thank you to the streamers for keeping a good thing going.
Yeah, I have like a half dozen MC containers sitting idle and the kids have access in Proxmox to start and stop them if they want to play. They play bedrock on their Switches but that’s the only place they play it.
They do, but it certainly wasn’t Microsoft’s idea. That’s been around since before they bought Minecraft, and it’s very clear that they don’t like it. They’ve added all kinds of dark pattern bullshit, like hiding private servers way at the bottom of the page and blocking them from console users entirely (requiring third party workarounds).
I don’t think they’re lying when they say they consider it piracy.
There’s also an EULA that you have to check the box for before you download the server software that basically amounts to “I acknowledge and accept that Microsoft can shut this down whenever they want for no reason at all and I have no recourse if they decide to do that.”
They consider it piracy out of convenience. What they case about is telemetry. They want all the event data from user interaction. Any such data is a gold mine for training AI. That makes it an asset in their eyes. An asset that the poor plebs get to keep and not even use for self-interested spy shit? Microsoft: “that’s not fair! Piracy!!”