Bane of my existence as obligate VPN user

Admin of Feddit.dk. We try not to use non-EU suppliers and I don't like the idea of depending so fully on something like Cloudflare. I could see us using an EU equivalent but don't really see the need right now.

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.

/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’d say selfhosting is the shelf that is standing under this.

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

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.

Lemmy.ca moving from Cloudflare to Deflect.ca.

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

Feddit.org uses Anubis

I literally can not see most images from lemmy.zip because of the cloudfare craptcha.

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.

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.

I mainly use Cloudflare for buying domains and DNS settings. Are there better, more resilient alternatives? I am not savvy enough for a hyper custom setup. I think I've seen Porkbun mentioned. I've used name cheap before. I do pay for NextDNS - is that something that could fit into this? I don't think so but maybe I'm underutilizing it.

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.

Self-host or die trying !

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

That and AWS US-East