Fair, though worth pointing out that the choice to use CloudFlare is an instance-level decision, not a software-level one, and the PieFed software is still faster than Lemmy regardless of the choice to use CloudFlare. And this despite showing 5-fold more posts, iirc it was a roughly 25-fold speedup per post shown for the main page.
Comment on Comparing network utilization of Lemmy, Kbin and PieFed - PieFed (2024)
0_o7@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 weeks agoLemmy is plenty fast, just the UI is seriously bloated. Using lemmy api on a third party app is a smooth af.
This is one of the reasons using PieFed on mobile feels as good if not better than native apps. The page loads super fast.
If you’re using piefed.social or any of the other popular piefed instances, they’re using CloudFlare. So ya, it’ll be faster because they have CDN all across the globe. Also your login credentials and tracking data will be sent to a cloudflare server without user knowledge.
So ya, I’d rather have a few milliseconds delay and avoid all that tracking and MITM. Thanks though.
OpenStars@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
moseschrute@lemmy.world 5 weeks ago
I don’t think caching benefits Lemmy and PieFed content that is changing very rapidly (e.g. new comments). That type of caching makes more sense for Lemmy/PieFed images.
However, bot traffic can get very expensive these days with all the AI crawlers. Cloudflare offers very good tooling to block these bots. I know there are other open source tools and I’m not defending Cloudflare, but it’s also easy to criticize when you’re not the person running the instance. From what I’ve seen, all the admins work very hard to keep the threadiverse running. I’m guessing that’s why a lot of instances are using Cloudflare.