It’s not good that cloudfare (or any single entity) “owns” half the internet.
100% this^. Even if they aren’t actively doing anything terrible that we know of, it still totally undermines people’s privacy, even those of us who try to be careful about that sort of thing. Cloudflare is fingerprinting you when you visit sites that use their services for security, and like google, their sheer ubiquity across the web means they can effectively watch and track you wherever you go.
More and more I’ve been running into the full-page error “please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed” while just browsing around the web. A site is completely locked to any user who runs into this error; it’s not just a popup notification, its a blank page with nothing but the error message and the only way to “fix” it is to whitelist their fingerprinting scripts. I use extensions like uBlock Origin of course, but for more fine-tuned script blocking, also uMatrix, so it’s usually because of one of those that I get the cloudflare error. I could of course whitelist it, but I never do, I just decide that page is not worth my time. But it’s getting harder to stick with that principle as I run into it more all the time, even for sites that it never used to be an issue. It’s also part of why it keeps getting more difficult to browse the web with TOR browser.
Fuck cloudflare. They’ve wormed their way into most of the web now but they’ve managed to do it in a quiet way that usually goes unnoticed if you’re not a privacy nerd. Everyone knows google and amazon are evil and do all that they can to track anything and everything people do, but cloudflare is becoming just as insidious.
I see someone already listed a bunch of hexbear comms, maybe as a half joke, but seriously some of them are the most active and fun if you’re a lefty. But a couple non-hexbear comms worth suggesting are
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
&
!privacy@lemmy.ml
Perhaps also !memes@lemmy.ml if you want not just leftist memes but also the drama of indignant, sometimes enraged libs (even an occassional frothing chud) coming into the comments and usually proving the accuracy of the meme they’re upset about. It’s one of the best
comms for that reason.
If you want great news analysis I would also suggest not just a news comm, but more specifically the newsmega thread at hexbear. It will change url every week since its a single post thread, not a comm. But it stands on its own so well I think its worth mentioning along with entire comms or instances. Hexbear has a certain reputation, some of it deserved (much of it not), but the bulletins and international news thread (aka newsmega) is, regardless of what you may think of the rest of the instance, one of the best places on the internet to get serious leftist/anti-imperialist analysis of current news and events as far as short form “reddit-like” (I hate to phrase it that way but you know what I mean) commentary and discussion.