I know well how Cloudflare works. I’ve used it myself at work, and for my personal website. That website you linked clearly doesn’t use it, because it took about 5 seconds to load up despite being entirely text. That’s why it’s a good service.
I find most of the criticisms it describes largely unconvincing in general, but particularly unconvincing in the fediverse. Yes, you can in fact access content on the fediverse without Cloudflare if you really want to. You can choose to use a different instance, and it doesn’t matter where that data is hosted. The fediverse is by design not a privacy-forward platform, so concerns about “content they expect to be private” don’t matter.
It’s still decentralised because each instance is run by its own instance administrators with their own rules and capable of maintaining its own culture. This is the real goal of federation. Nothing about Cloudflare runs counter to that. Even if they were all hosted in the same data centre it would not be a large mark against the fediverse, though there would be some small risk of being deplatformed by the host. That risk exists with Cloudflare too, except that a site previously behind Cloudflare can choose to no longer use it far more easily than a site can move its hosting provider at short notice—plus Cloudflare has a history of being extremely slow to wield that power.
coffeeClean@infosec.pub 6 months ago
Selling your soul for a slightly faster load time is your personal preference but trading off inclusion of marginalized groups so some people get a faster load time is not in line with the netneutrality principles the fedi community values.
That’s not true specifically for Lemmy. Images do not get copied. If a LemmyWorld user posts an image in a federated community, everything except the image is accessible on other instances. So we get a broken threads. There are also various other circumstances requiring users to visit a thread’s copy on another host. If that other host is Cloudflare, CF’s access restrictions determine whether the user gets access.
That’s not true either. Cloudflare gets a view on all traffic, both public and private. Users are deceived because of the lack of disclosures about the CF MitM. E.g. users expect a DM to be visible to the admins of both hosts with no idea the Cloudflare also has visibility as well. Most users don’t even know about the existence of CF.
No, it’s centralized because Cloudflare controls access. What aussie.zone is doing is very rare. Cloudflared nodes run with CF’s default access controls, which blindly gives CF blanket centralized authority over who gets access. This goes directly against the purpose of federation philosophy. Even when a node like aussie.zone whitelists Tor, there are still half a dozen other demographics of people who they uniformly and centrally discriminate against.