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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Bane of my existence as obligate VPN user
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.
/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.
Piefed.ca too
In addition to the tech reasons mentioned, the click here checkbox is just a fucking infuriating interruption
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.
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?
Feddit.org uses Anubis
It’s a free way to get a reverse proxy for a self hosted website and not expose your 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.
What are the alternatives?
And a VPS and any number of tunneling systems for the remote reverse proxy.
Rathole is my goto. But SSH forwarding, wireguard… There’s plenty, even ones that will entirely manage the reverse proxy on the VPS.Letsencrypt for SSL, fail2ban for ddos protection, literally just a disk for cdn.
Does fail2ban actually help?
In a strong enough DDOS, you need someone before you to stop the traffic, at which point you either have a good provider, or have to submit to someone bigger than you.
This is probably why so many people use cloudflare. Similarly to discord, their serivices can be found on several different platforms but they are the only ones who offer all of them for free.
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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.
I’m happy with porkbun. They’re pretty well integrated ddclient now, but make sure the version you use has them already
PORKBUN FTW! 🐷
I also love Porkbun, but unfortunately they’ve recently moved their DNS backend to Cloudflare, soooo…
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?
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.
It might be your browser or extensions. I get that more on Librewolf than Mullvad, for example.
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?
