Right to Repair

This page covers CF as a walled garden generally:

https://thefreeworld.noblogs.org/post/2024/03/18/cloudflare-has-created-the-largest-most-rigidly-exclusive-walled-garden-in-the-world/

W.r.t the fedi, Cloudflare blocks Tor and VPNs by default. So if you wanted to run your own Lemmy node, it would be unable to federate to Cloudflare nodes over Tor or VPNs. Lemmy end users are also oppressed by CF because images come from the source and are not cached. So if someone posts an image on a CF node and I use Tor to connect to slrpnk.net, I can only see the text and not the pics.

Users of CF nodes tend to be ignorant about the exclusivity of many clearnet sites, so they often unwittingly post links to tor-hostile sites.

Are you talking about a pure matter of size?

That too. The fedi is designed to make decentralisation /possible/. But obvisouly if network effect causes a majority of people to pile onto a single host, that’s not decentralised. Lemmy was not designed to be smart about this.

There are several node operators who do not give a shit about decentralisation or the balance that that requires. They just want to have a disproportionate amount of power over users so they can control the narrative through selective censorship. So they grow nodes that are obscenely large. Lemmy World goes to the extreme of using Cloudflare to circumvent the natural control of resource limitations, to grow out of control.

Some non-CF nodes also don’t know when to quit new registrations. I track them by calculating the average node size. If a node has more than 2 standard deviations above the avg number of users, I consider them centralised and avoid posting in their communities, just as I avoid posting in Cloudflare’s walled garden.