Both Lemmy.world and my server rely upon Cloudflare for SSL, DDOS protection, CDN services, etc. I use it to provide me with a Cloudflare tunnel to get around not being able to forward ports.
Outages have put this dependance to question, and the same with recent news about the US government obtaining data through subpoenas. It’s a free service that takes care of many of the difficulties when it comes to hosting your service online, but everyone knows that free is not free.
What do you all think about Cloudflare?
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it’s making the internet centralized and proprietary, i hate it. i do understand how it’s a very easy option for website operators struggling against malicious bots though.
Dev here, building a public SaaS app. I’m aware of the centralization arguments, but CF seems to be the least worst of all the options in terms of alternatives. CAPTCHAs are awful, and I can’t put up my own multi-Tbps DDOS buffer. I also regularly access my own resources from behind multiple VPNs; other than having to click the human button it doesn’t consign me to an evening of identifying traffic lights.
The ones that require traffic lights and shit never seem to work properly for me. They always make me do an endless repetition of them, going through dozens and dozens before it finally, maybe lets me see the website I was trying to get to.
Maybe I’m just not human enough?
It might be your browser or extensions. I get that more on Librewolf than Mullvad, for example.
I’ve found that clicking them slower (until the new image is fully faded in) can help for the ones that have images disappearing after clicking, and not actually clicking every square containing part of the traffic light (if it’s only a tiny edge) helps with the ones that are one image of a thing. I guess being fast or noticing details isn’t human enough. Having to wait is insanely annoying though.
When I’ve used tor, after back on firefox cloudflare put me through endless captchas.
They really do like to penalize people for caring about their privacy, don’t they?
Isn’t Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?
It fully is yes
Cloudflare is one of the secret ruling parties of the internet.
I don’t understand why so many Americans like to use it, even the ones who tend to think liberal and go for self hosting.
Cloudflare is just your average, often free, TLS-terminating proxy everyone uses and definitely NOT a NSA operation for being able to read and control all internet traffic.
You should definitely use it, preferably with AWS or Azure (or both!) as the underlying server.
Also, pick US-East1 so you are down when everybody else is.
I do wonder if everyone would be so comfortable with Cloudflare if they were a Russian or Chinese operation.
Wouldn’t be surprised to find CF were also controlling some of the biggest DDOS botnets to remind people what happens when you don’t let the Americans see all your traffic…
This image is inaccurate, because it suggests Cloudflare is a small block. The original xkcd makes more sense, because it is a project run by a single person. To represent Cloudflare, it should be a huge block given it’s a very large company with a market cap of $69 billion.
Fair enough, one other guy said it should be the thin block above the one pointed to. Makes sense, and it can still be yanked from under you.
Suddenly yanking it out might cause a lot of stuff to collapse, but at least some parts would still be able to operate without it in the long term. Maybe one of the blocks in the upper two stacks?
The modern Internet would be way worse without it, but it still sucks how centralized it is.
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It’s a great service and it works mostly well. The internet is a little bit better because of them.
It’s also optional and simple to transition away from since they don’t host your environment.
That and AWS US-East
Can you explain this one a bit more?
us-east-1 was (one of?) the first region for AWS and a lot of their systems don’t respond super well if that region has issues. AWS is also the backbone of a lot of the internet
Proprietary centralisation and gatekeeping of the internet, built by a profit first company that actively and deliberately protected nazis and kiwifarms until it became financially harmful for them to continue to do so.
They can fuck right off.
Cloudflare isn’t profitable according to their quarterly earnings reports.
I hope you can appreciate that that does not in any way change my reply
Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.
It keeps blocking my VPN, which is highly irritating.
Easy fix, just ban the act of DDoSsing… duh 🙄
/j
/rant on I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.
People write an insecure app in Express/Flask/whatever, deploy it to the internet, then bolt on Cloudflare as a WAF and add Datadog because they have no idea what’s happening under the hood or limited themselves with their up-front choices.
This is marketed as progress. /rant off
But there are valid use cases like you mentioned. And it’s the enshitifed sites that fund that free tier.
There’s some irony about the Fediverse going through a centralized service, but I don’t know of a better free answer. A cheap answer might be a VPS with Caddy and automatic Lets Encrypt, but it’s not turnkey.
I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.
I think it’s also a symptom of assholes fucking it up for everyone. You wouldn’t need the DoS-protections or security tools if there were no attackers.
Don’t know a solution for that, unfortunately. I think you have a point about inadequate development work, but I’m not sure it’s the whole puzzle.
