Didn’t down vote ya, but the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare. It doesn’t seem to be that nauseating.
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airikr@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Cloudflare check. Yak.
irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago 
dsilverz@catodon.rocks 3 weeks ago the very forum you posted to utilizes Cloudflare
The difference (and the bright side of the Fediverse) is that Fediverse is decentralized so, while some instances can have Cloudflare or similar algorithms (e.g. Anubis) in place, other instances without said algorithms can still interact without having to go through said algorithms. The OC's instance does neither use Cloudflare nor Anubis (lemmy.ml used to use Anubis, but the admins seem to have turned it off).
!selfhosted@lemmy.worldmesamunefire@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Does lemmy.world use cloudflare?
Also im confused, is there a reason people dont like cloudflare? Other than eating up caching for the entire internet of course?
- dsilverz@catodon.rocks 3 weeks ago
is there a reason people dont like cloudflare
I hate Cloudflare especially because it's slowly becoming a monopoly (if it didn't become already). Webmasters are giving too much power to a single corporation to rule over who can access online content and who can't. Old browsers and privacy-oriented browsers (e.g. Librewolf) are known to be more likely to be refused by Cloudflare, and this is a form of prejudice.
Also, and bringing Anubis to the loop too, there's the lack of user consent. As a guest/user, I'm unable to consent with the heavy computations (and potential damage to my decade-old laptop from overheating) before these happen.
What I mean about "lack of consent" can be better illustrated by the "This site uses cookies" message: it often offers buttons so the user/guest can choose to either "accept" or "reject". Have you wondered why every website must give these options nowadays? Because it's a literal law. Neither Cloudflare nor Anubis have a "we'll need to validate your browser, do you consent? Proceed with verification / Leave the website". Something tells me Cloudflare, and Anubis as well, are literally illegal pieces of code in European Union, given the lack of user consent, although this wasn't tested in courts yet. I'm not European (I'm Brazilian), but it would be quite entertaining to see this tested on an European court.
Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device. Yes, because when any kind of computation happens, the CPU gets a little warm, and when said computations involve cryptomining-like behavior, CPU temps can raise a lot. And for devices such as mine, an i5-7200U laptop whose fan isn't good (and I can't afford a new one), the CPU can easily get to 90C, to the point of damage, if the computations take long enough. Given a PoW relies on randomness, there's a literal chance that a challenge would kill my laptop if it took several seconds during a Brazilian summer (>42C almost wet-bulb). And I doubt the webmaster would be liable for the material damage their website caused to my personal device, so I've been speedrunning my way to close websites as soon as I see "Just a moment" or "Making sure you're not a bot" as their title, I even made myself an userscript for doing so.
!selfhosted@lemmy.world- irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Finally, these things can cause literal harm to a device
Unpack that a bit more. What are you using to determine the harm to the device? I understand the concept that heat kills, however, as someone who watches temps closely on my server and especially on my old PC, I can’t confirm that a site causes a dramatic rise in temps. I have openhardware monitor on my desktop that remains ‘always on top’ and I see very little variation from site to site as far as temps are concerned. Just curious as to how you came to that conclusion. Perhaps it’s because I lean heavily on my standalone pFsense firewall to filter traffic.
airikr@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Cloudflare is a Big Tech company (first red flag) based in USA (second red flag) and Big Tech are known for giving not popular things like privacy concerns.
When it comes to Cloudflare, they decrypt your HTTPS traffic in order to process the data (a very BIG red flag). And you can’t do shit about other than refuse to use Cloudflare on your website.
But how often will that happen with all the ignorant and careless people all around the world? Very rare! So I tend to just avoid the shit instead.
- medium.com/…/the-shocking-truth-about-cloudflares… (ye-ye, I know Medium is shit, but they can have good content).
- terms.law/Privacy-Watchdog/…/cloudflare/
- discuss.privacyguides.net/t/…/14531
- irmadlad@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
People don’t like Cloudflare, I assume, because it’s concentrating your data into one channel. They have control much like a lot of major data centers. So it’s 6 of this, half dozen of the other, and those are justified differently by selfhosters. I would hazard a guess that all major banking institutions use Cloudflare. It’s just that ubiquitous. I use Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust and I absolutely love it. Cloudflare is unavoidable on the internet.
elena@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Thank you for bringing this up! This is Elena, the author of the blog blog.elenarossini.com.
My Ghost blog is being hosted by Magic Pages… when I signed up last year they had a fully European stack (Bunny CDN) - something that is incredibly important to me.
Recently they moved from BunnyCDN to Cloudflare to keep costs down (prices had skyrocketed). I have no saying in this, but I understand Jannis and his team.
Magic Pages takes care of all the software updates and offers amazing support (plus it would cost me 2x to self-host it… I made the calculations).
And for the record, my personal website - which I self-host - uses BunnyCDN: elenarossini.com
airikr@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Thank you for your reply. But if you can self-host your personal website, why don’t you self-host Ghost?
elena@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Because Ghost now requires Docker and it’s way beyond my scope of expertise (I used to self-host a previous version with Ghost CLI - it will be sunset in the next version).
Ghost is also expensive to self-host, especially the newsletter part. Magic Pages does all the maintenance and updates for me for the price of what I used to pay just for the newsletter integration… and I don’t have to worry about a thing 🥲
airikr@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
If you have your own server, I can write you a bash script for installing Ghost and updating it when you run the script.
What do you say?