it's making the internet centralized and proprietary, i hate it. i do understand how it's a very easy option for website operators struggling against malicious bots though.

Dev here, building a public SaaS app. I'm aware of the centralization arguments, but CF seems to be the least worst of all the options in terms of alternatives. CAPTCHAs are awful, and I can't put up my own multi-Tbps DDOS buffer. I also regularly access my own resources from behind multiple VPNs; other than having to click the human button it doesn't consign me to an evening of identifying traffic lights.

It’s a great service and it works mostly well. The internet is a little bit better because of them.

It’s also optional and simple to transition away from since they don’t host your environment.

Isn't Cloudflare more like the thin horizontal block above that one?

That and AWS US-East

Decent idea, but too much power centralized to one company.

Easy fix, just ban the act of DDoSsing... duh 🙄

/j

The modern Internet would be way worse without it, but it still sucks how centralized it is.

I literally can not see most images from lemmy.zip because of the cloudfare craptcha.

Proprietary centralisation and gatekeeping of the internet, built by a profit first company that actively and deliberately protected nazis and kiwifarms until it became financially harmful for them to continue to do so.

They can fuck right off.

I use Hostinger but it isn’t free, $1.99/mo deal at the moment, normally like 13. It does blocking like cloudflare. AI scraping blocking too

Cloudflare is one of the secret ruling parties of the internet.

I don't understand why so many Americans like to use it, even the ones who tend to think liberal and go for self hosting.

It keeps blocking my VPN, which is highly irritating.

Bane of my existence as obligate VPN user

This image is inaccurate, because it suggests Cloudflare is a small block. The original xkcd makes more sense, because it is a project run by a single person. To represent Cloudflare, it should be a huge block given it's a very large company with a market cap of $69 billion.

I use it for a couple websites. I'm a geek and can make things work software wise but I'm absolutely not a programmer, I just don't really grasp a lot of it. Give me some hardware and I can build whatever but I digress. Cloudflare has prevented a bunch of attacks on my sites and the caching function is helping stave off switching to a VPS for now.

It can be a PITA if you don't have native IPv6 and use Hurricane Electric's IPv6 tunnel broker. A lot of sites that are hooked into cloudflare and some other similar services pop up captcha's every visit or just pain don't function correctly. I'm going to switch to Route64 as an alternative to HE, they only provide a /56 vs a /48 but it's not like I'm going to need that many /64's at this point.

It's a free way to get a reverse proxy for a self hosted website and not expose your home IP and avoid attacks, so kind of hard to pass up tbh.

I used to use them, but found that since I'm only hosting for myself, I just don't benefit much (if at all) from their services. The only thing that was actually doing any amount of work was Tunnel (similar to you, I can't forward ports).

Their service decrypts/snoops on your traffic by nature, and while my traffic is mostly just updating todo lists, taking notes, and backing up photos, I also sync my keepass database and in general just don't want my data snooped on.

I've since rolled my own Tunnel equivalent with frp on a VPS and have completely dropped CF.

/rant on I think CloudFlare is the direct result of the enshitififcation of development work.

People write an insecure app in Express/Flask/whatever, deploy it to the internet, then bolt on Cloudflare as a WAF and add Datadog because they have no idea what's happening under the hood or limited themselves with their up-front choices.

This is marketed as progress. /rant off

But there are valid use cases like you mentioned. And it's the enshitifed sites that fund that free tier.

There's some irony about the Fediverse going through a centralized service, but I don't know of a better free answer. A cheap answer might be a VPS with Caddy and automatic Lets Encrypt, but it's not turnkey.

Lemmy.ca moving from Cloudflare to Deflect.ca.

In addition to the tech reasons mentioned, the click here checkbox is just a fucking infuriating interruption