What?? I thought cloudflare is good. Free Ddos protection, etc.
Single point of failure for the whole internet.
I wouldn’t call clourflare a single point.
Their management control plane absolutely is a single point of failure.
Only because no one does what they do as well as they do it.
If they had competition, that wouldn’t be the case. Sadly, there are very few other good guys out there…
What about akamai? Other CDNs and the like.
There exists competition, they’ve just been doing it consistently well at a large scale for awhile.
They’ve done nothing to prevent competition, because they’re legit AF. The competition just hasn’t put a dent in their market share because they’re excellent at what they do.
If cloudflare goes down you can just update DNS to not use it …
Well the admin of a site could opt out of using cloudflare for the time being, a user could do literally nothing. Errors in Cloudflare can easily take down their servers and therefore the CDN and access to like 20% of websites. And Bugs in Cloudflare can even leak user data.
So cloudflare can grant DDOS Protection, CDNs and other exploiting protection, but can take down large parts of everything, temporarily or permanently.
Shhhh you can’t just be reasonable here. This guy watched a YouTube video, he knows what he’s talking about
If cloudflare decided not to host my server I would have a bit of downtime, a couple of hours, but I’d be up again on someone else’s CDN tomorrow. I don’t think OP understands the role of cloudflare at all.
Agreed, and I would say what cloudflare does for the internet (their work on the IETF, generally letting small sites stay alive without needing an SRE to worry about DDoS attacks, etc) outweighs the general negative possibility of them being a potential single point of failure
We use their CDN, and they do our load balancing for work and they’re great at it.
There are benefits and costs. Cloudflare makes it easy to maintain high uptime as a small site sysadmin at the cost of free DDoS protection isn’t actually free. Cloudflare turns all users of websites that employ it into the products of surveillance capitalism
Honestly, I don’t know how any end user who doesn’t understand IT and wasn’t around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don’t have the information or experience to make the claim.
I’ve been using the intermet since 2003 and have seen no difference except when cloudfare breaks.
Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?
There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn’t even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.
There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don’t even realize what it was like before.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Relevant Tom Scott video for anyone else who’s into that
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I can answer that for you! No. They have never self hosted a website. In fact, I doubt they have ever connected to a website via any protocol beyond http/https. I’d bet a paycheck on it.
Wait, there are other protocols?
You are very difficult to respect.
Your respect is very difficult to care about.
That’s the thing about not respecting you – I don’t value any of your opinions.
Being so willing to pontificate about something you know so little about, I don’t think any one will value your opinion in this thread. At least, they shouldn’t lol.
Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven’t noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.
And the fact that your favorite sites aren’t down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.
It’s the eternal IT conundrum. Something goes wrong: “What are we paying you for?!” Everything goes right: “What are we paying you for?!”
It’s best to ignore the users as much as possible and just keep working.
In before they start hating on aws.
I’ve been using the intermet since 2003
Then you should remember this: https://youtu.be/48rz8udZBmQ?si=81BQVmYGYRhpPCsw
rude
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/48rz8udZBmQ?si=81BQVmYGYRhpPCsw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Cloudflare is solving some really big problems, right? Like DDOS?
Literally trying to figure out if Cloudflare or tailscale would be the best way to go. The memes have spoken
Don’t use memes to make decisions I’m just mad I can’t use the discord app on my desktop, can’t download manga from nhentai without jumping through hoops anymore, and have to solve 5 captchas in a row when I use a vpn which is all the time.
Cloudflare is excellent, this post is nonsense.
Tailscale is the way! Have been running it since January, flawlessly.
I went full rabbit hole and discovered headscale
One more head of Hydra. Espionage System built by the big techs
I really think that on the list of worst single points of failure, DNS is not one of them. Given how easy it is to actually switch. And given that cloudflare outages are not nearly as common, The times they do happen usually are only for half an hour or so.
Cuckflare: host loves it, everyone else hates it
“So you solved the catcha, ok, we don’t care anyway.”
“Solve 5 more because you’re using a vpn.”
Cloudflare is having some weird issues with Discord this morning.
I’d claim it’s the other way around until proven otherwise. Configuring the edge is not for everyone
Idk, but my homelab thanks it for the free ZTN and workers.
O.o Do you understand what Cloudflare actually does?
Provides a single point of failure for a large portion of the internet that nobody else has any control over?
So no, then.
Well no but I heard other people say it’s bad and give some half reasons why. Why do I need to understand the tech if I just want to be mad about it? /s
Fr though cloudflare is a giant, but they give some hardcore protections to little guys like me. If they ever were bad to me I’d switch to akamai or something. Plus if we’re going to talk about monopolizing the web let’s talk about Google, Azure, and AWS.
Oh no, centralising DNS and CDN traffic which are critical for the web and the internet into a single company is a bad idea?! Who knew!?!
While that can indeed be considered an issue, the idea that this somehow makes the internet objectively worse is debatable.
there is no debate i am always correct :)
That is an objectively untrue statement.
you are an objectively untrue statement
gotem
Using cloudflare is more reliable than using your own stuff which is still an option that nobody chooses anymore because it’s better to choose cloudflare or something similar.
I’m going to go ahead and assume you don’t work with internet security in any way, have no experience in web development, and have never attempted to provide web application services to more people than you can count on your fingers, but if you had, cloudflare is mana from heaven.
This persons main connection to the internet is hentai.
Just… save your braincells.
just don’t use cloudflare if you dont like it and its not a single point, like they have tons of servers all over the planet
203 upvotes, 202 downvotes. The most controversial lemmy post I’ve ever seen
Wait… so why is it 69/23 for me?
Vote federation can be weird
Defederation probably
Federation is its own magical fuckup. Look at my comments for a recent example.
I feel like I’m making history. A real end user vs tech people conundrum.
A “people who know what cloudflare acutally does” vs “people who found the meme funny” conundrum.
I am baffled seeing so much cloudflare fanboys here…
Cloudflare is everywhere, it sees everything, it holds everything, it has private keys for tons and tons of websites, it’s subject to the absence of any privacy law in the US, but they are “nice”. Wow.
Google also was nice. It used to give you good results. Twitter also was nice.
I want to upvote and downvote this post… it’s so controversial
They have a shitty way to be useful.
I would personally go with just downvoting. I can use discord again now so I’m not mad at cloudfare anymore.
Throwback to when 1.1.1.1 dropped and we all loved couldflare
Not all of us.
You’re trying too hard
What ever bud, y’all aren’t trying hard enough. I’ve been on the fuck CloudFlare train for ten years. Centralizing surveillance SPOF can eat a bag of dicks.
To all the upstart website-havers: no, you probably don’t actually need to use cloudflare
