Yes, but often those countries come with their own huge bag of problems.

Not saying they don't, everything has pros and cons and you need to decide what's really important to you and whether or not it's worth overcoming the challenges associated, many decide it isn't, and that's okay, but some decide it is and choose to pursue it.

I'm saying we don't give the copyright and corporate trolls what they want and act or talk like the enemy states out of their reach don't exist or that someone couldn't or wouldn't go there to do the dirty work, or imply that these places are going away sometime in the near future.

All not that easy and it can get highly criminal very fast.

Of course it is, anyone should know that working in and for an enemy country is criminal. If someone didn't understand that they need to pick a side in the world they deserve what they get. Most people who are dedicated enough to go that far understand the risks well enough, and are willing to take them.

This is such a stupid argument considering you don't need a fucking giant ass data center to host a tiny little git server. I've seen this argument time and time again, but the real reason people go with VPSes is convenience and laziness.

I would absolutely agree with the other person that renting your own VPS is not self-hosting, not by a long shot. You could argue that you need a massive host for a large video or music platform, or even a large git platform with thousands of repos, but not for a tiny single user, single project forgejo or gitlab instance or a single static web page.

Yeah but like not everyone has a a thousand acres either - though you dont hear shoppers at the farmers market calling themselves farmers