Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

Bane of my existence as obligate VPN user

Given that a lot of websites need cloudflare to shield them from getting DOSd by the infinite hord of web scrapers maybe cloudshare should be depicted as a shield blocking a broom from knocking the tower over? Probably both held by the same person...

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.

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.

The modern Internet would be way worse without it, but it still sucks how centralized it is.

I haven't had my shit up for very long, and HOLY SHIT the unique visitors numbers are nuts. I think this is because of federation, but mainly the images being loaded across other instances.

I looked at deflect and it ain't gonna be cheap, the number will only go up, and I am the sole user of the site. Storing the shit in a media bucket or whatever would fix it, but I'd have to pay for that shit too.

/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.

Isn't Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?

Lemmy.ca moving from Cloudflare to Deflect.ca.

It's a free way to get a reverse proxy for a self hosted website and not expose your home IP and avoid attacks, so kind of hard to pass up tbh.

Feddit.org uses Anubis

In addition to the tech reasons mentioned, the click here checkbox is just a fucking infuriating interruption

That and AWS US-East

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.

Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.

I use it for a couple websites. I'm a geek and can make things work software wise but I'm absolutely not a programmer, I just don't really grasp a lot of it. Give me some hardware and I can build whatever but I digress. Cloudflare has prevented a bunch of attacks on my sites and the caching function is helping stave off switching to a VPS for now.

It can be a PITA if you don't have native IPv6 and use Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnel broker. A lot of sites that are hooked into cloudflare and some other similar services pop up captcha's every visit or just pain don't function correctly. I'm going to switch to Route64 as an alternative to HE, they only provide a /56 vs a /48 but it's not like I'm going to need that many /64's at this point.

Easy fix, just ban the act of DDoSsing... duh 🙄

/j