The lottery approach pissed me off so bad, I decided to leave Scaleway altogether. They also aren’t upfront about their contingents. I wanted to try out an M1 instance and before registering and putting my credit card info in, it seemed like it’d be all fine, I just have to put in cc info. I did, they told me there are no instances available. The fair way would be to be upfront about it in my opinion.

I understand it more like a struggle to keep up it the demand for these instances and this was their attempt to "gamify" it.

It's clear this service is a social media psyop and the GP poster mentioning it is in on it.

It isn't a lottery as much as an availability constraint.

First you have a limit of 1 stardust per datacenter per customer. Second, they only spin up a fixed number of new stardust servers per day.

It is a loss leader just like in any other business. They are losing money on one instance to get you in the door and you realize their other services are awesome.