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Really pleased to see this post outlining how @devs helps deliver more of the fediverse than any other platform. And the majority of that is done for free, as part of our Fast Forward program for supporting open source and the open web. Best of all, there are *lots* of different platforms doing this work, exactly as you'd hope — the open web is more competitive and enables lots of different options. blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-ho

jwz

@anildash Given the current Substack implosion, it's disappointing to see so many people still giving Cloudflare money. A company who's position on Nazis is basically: "We would gleefully do business with ISIS if we were not legally prohibited from doing so".

@jwz @anildash yeah I keep having to remind people in this industry that cloudflare was protecting a site that was trying to get people killed. And when I complained about this, that site listed my name and address and said something "needed to be done" about me.

Yeah no I don't think we should use them for our site!

@foone @jwz @anildash

Great. </sarcasm>

@forgejo and @Codeberg should take this into consideration given the DDoS they're under.

@RyunoKi @foone @jwz @anildash @forgejo @Codeberg
@drewdevault

I won't be surprised if Cloudflare facilitated these DDoS attacks, as they are jolly good for their business...

@RyunoKi Is there a write-up of Cloudflare’s bad judgments and possibly which alternatives exist?

@foone @jwz @anildash @forgejo @Codeberg@social.anoxinon.de

@foone @jwz @anildash i just really wish there were a drop-in replacement for Cloudflare, because there isn't one. (Fastly does what it does really well, but it doesn't do everything Cloudflare does.)

@adrienne @foone @jwz @anildash

Why? Is there something Cloudflare does that the world wouldn't be improved by nobody doing?

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash I assure you that as a web developer working for almost entirely small clients and small agencies, a one-stop-shop for easily-manageable DNS/edge caching/WAF/optimization is a thing that saves me and everyone i work with absolute bucketloads of time and money.

@adrienne @foone @jwz @anildash

Undoubtedly. There are lots of ways of saving absolute bucketloads of money. Burning publicly-subsidized petrochemicals. Using slave labor. Absconding with savings & loan deposits.

My point is that the world is a better place if people make moral choices instead of externalizing harms in exchange for "bucketloads of money."

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash Indeed, but there's absolutely nothing inherently evil or exploitative about having all-in-one, easily-manageable solutions to various maintenance challenges. The problem is that nobody else currently DOES. And i would very much LIKE to move every client i've ever worked with off of Cloudflare but I DO NOT HAVE ANYWHERE TO MOVE THEM TO.

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash "Your three-person business can pay Cloudflare $20/month and your normal IT person can tweak things if necessary" versus "your three-person business can pay a full-time consultant to try to manage five different services, all of which cost significantly more than $20/month by themselves" is, in fact, a thing i cannot sell people on, sorry!

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash There's nothing INHERENTLY HARMFUL about DNS or edge-caching or WAFs, so comparing them to slave labor or absconding with people's life savings is pretty fucking ridiculous!

@adrienne @foone @jwz @anildash

Straw man. We weren't talking about needless web cruft, we were talking about Cloudflare. Or, you know, Nazis.

While there are Nazis to ridicule, I won't bother with ridiculing needless web cruft. That can come later.

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash Oh, you're one of THOSE. My bad for thinking you were asking a real question!

@woody @foone @jwz @anildash Instead, you're apparently questioning my anti-Nazi bonafides on the basis of my having said "Cloudflare provides a valuable service that i wish someone else also provided."

@woody @jwz @anildash I caught CloudFlare hosting Hamas's web presence in November-December last year. I imagine the only reason they stopped is that someone pointed out to them that it was actually illegal for them to do so.

@mathew @jwz @anildash
More likely they got behind on their payments.

@jwz @anildash Fully agree. Cloudflare should be avoided at all costs, and not only because of their political views but also because it's yet another layer of centralization threatening the free web with bullshit like "Checking if the site connection is secure" or "You're using #Tor Browser? Bad luck for you, fuck off". When I was still following #MastoAdmin I found it always super silly when fedi admins were telling proudly that their decentralized Mastodon instance is now behind CF. 🤦🏼‍♂️

@jwz literally the very next post in my feed is an instance admin who got scraped by some bot, and is now facing a 'bankrupt the instance' bill from fastly.

AFAIK there is still no CDN provider whose pricing for mid-high bandwidth sites is within three orders of magnitude of cloudflares.

@knack "The only reason I'm doing business with Nazis is because of the great savings" is perhaps not the good take you think it is.

@jwz "Please increase our bandwidth spend by about ~10% of our entire engineering budget on switching to a more expensive provider" did not get a positive response when I took the business case upstairs.

@knack So you're comfortable sitting at that table with the nazis, got it.

@jwz “comfort” is relative. The work saves (many) lives; I have heard from people who got to keep parts of their body thanks to it. I can stomach the presence of a little evil while I’m doing that.

@jwz anyhow, maybe think about whether “call anyone who points out why people are not taking your advice a nazi” is an effective persuasive approach? That kind of dunking sucked the interesting discussion out of twitter and I’m glad to see very little of it on mastodon.

I think questions like “Why are CF able to offer services at this price but nobody else can” are much more likely to lead to some (sorely-needed) competition in the 1-2tb/day CDN space.

I saw that, and question why an instance of that size needs a CDN, besides being hosted on the most expensive offering in the region.

Surely one can set up alerts through their CDN for unusual activity? (Not used one so I don't know, genuine question)

I also saw her say "I engineer really well" as to why someone could pull 6TB in a day. Liar. It's because they paid a CDN who literally just did their job and delivered the requested data.

CC: @jwz@mastodon.social

@snott @knack @jwz easy for folk who aren’t doing the work (or even familiar with the constraints) to criticise.

Sometimes expensive mistakes happen when you build stuff (also, cultural context? I read “I engineer really well” as self-deprecating sarcasm)

Which I why I asked.

I take it you don't have the actual answer then.

FYI I helped on a server much larger than that one in scale and never needed a CDN. Hence why am not familiar with them.

CC: @knack@aus.social @jwz@mastodon.social

@snott @knack @jwz I mean, whether it’s officially supported or not, you can definitely rig something up to alert on that; it’s essentially always a question of “did you recognise you needed to and did you get around to that specific task yet”.