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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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.
That and AWS US-East
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?
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?
It might be your browser or extensions. I get that more on Librewolf than Mullvad, for example.
Isn’t Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?
It fully is yes
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.
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.
Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.
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.
Easy fix, just ban the act of DDoSsing… duh 🙄
/j
Stupid solution. Criminals don’t care if something is banned.
What they need to do is ban reporting on them. Can’t be a problem if there’s no record of it ever happening
Police makes police reports. Ban the police! 😏
It keeps blocking my VPN, which is highly irritating.
I used to use them, but found that since I’m only hosting for myself, I just don’t benefit much (if at all) from their services. The only thing that was actually doing any amount of work was Tunnel (similar to you, I can’t forward ports).
Their service decrypts/snoops on your traffic by nature, and while my traffic is mostly just updating todo lists, taking notes, and backing up photos, I also sync my keepass database and in general just don’t want my data snooped on.
I’ve since rolled my own Tunnel equivalent with frp on a VPS and have completely dropped CF.
I use Hostinger but it isn’t free, $1.99/mo deal at the moment, normally like 13. It does blocking like cloudflare. AI scraping blocking too
I found it when I needed to access a service I had running in a docker container from an external machine. It was magic at the time. I’ve used it to host private GitHub repos with access controls and it works for that too. I haven’t developed a strong opinion perhaps because of its utility.
It really is like magic. Also happy cake day.
Oh hey! Thanks :)
