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. https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/who-hosts-the-fediverse-instances
@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!
@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!
@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.
@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.
@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.