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?
What, LLM scrapers still don’t solve captchas, despite being better at them than humans? How come?
Isn’t Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?
It fully is yes
That would imply the web stack wouldn’t crash if you remove them.
Depends how fast you pull it out.
It’s like jenga, janga? Idk how to spell it. Try pulling that one out without it crashing. Sure it could stand if it were never there in the first place, but it is there, so therefore it’s gonna be a pain to remove it safely
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.
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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
Bane of my existence as obligate VPN user
Can you expand on it? How do websites block vpn? Do they just block all the other countries? Why would you want to visit such websites?
/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.
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
It keeps blocking my VPN, which is highly irritating.
Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.
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! 😏
In addition to the tech reasons mentioned, the click here checkbox is just a fucking infuriating interruption
More infuriating than captcha?
No but we need to get rid of all types
How are you planning to do it? It’s typically used as a defence against bots which are becoming more of problem not less. What you describe is Cloudflare’s managed challenge, most of the time it doesn’t even need you to click anything because you already clicked somewhere else.
Ideally a human user wouldn’t have to encounter such a system at all
In your ideal world it means that you are tracked between websites. It’s mostly how it works now.
Nah, the solution should just be done in the background. Invisible and not a forced interaction
You don’t see a problem with automating a thing against automation? It can be done but in principle the less forced human interaction you get the more privacy invasion it requires.
I literally can not see most images from lemmy.zip because of the cloudfare craptcha.
Is that what it is? I thought it was just my app being weird, but then I see similar stuff in the browser, too.
If you use your web browser for lemmy, find a .zip post and try to view the image directly when it resuses to load. You’ll immediately get a cloudfare craptcha and then for that session lemmy.zip images will be more willing to work
Doesn’t seem to do anything with Alexandrite, does Photon fare any better?
I don’t think there are any workarounds for the apps. Cloudfare uses sessions that also take what client you’re using into account. I more of said that comment so anyone can see the proof for themselves.
