[api]

> I have my reservations about CloudFlare with regard to centralizing the web, but this tunnel is fantastic

Superior UI/UX offered by centralized systems is why everything is being centralized.

People will trade everything including privacy and security for ease of use. The market has shown this time and time again.

[hombre_fatal]

Getting ddosed by a $5 botnet, which gets cheaper every day, tends to change people's minds about Cloudflare.

Your users don't really care about decentralized utopia when your service doesn't work.

[api]

The only decentralization that's going to work is actual decentralization where there's not really anything to DDOS, or rather the entire system is itself a botnet.

[acdha]

There’s always something to DDoS. It comes down to whether the attacker has more resources than you have server capacity, and these days attacks can be measured in terabits.

[fomine3]

Ultimately big CDN is the only way to win for DDoS.

[moontear]

Help me understand what you mean: my service ok particular wouldn’t be ddosed because nobody cares.

I guess bots are hitting CF IPs at large and therefore services might be disrupted?

[hombre_fatal]

Well, every service that gets ddosed was once a service that nobody cared about.

But if your service is in a category that attracts ddos (like a forum or game) and you ever get enough traction for someone to care (doesn’t take much), it might surprise you how cheap it is to take you down and how limited your options are against a simple volumetric attack.

[anderspitman]

Not to mention Cloudflare Tunnel is a loss leader. Basically any new entrant has to either get funding or justify charging money for tunnel traffic.

Cloudflare Tunnel has gotten good enough there aren't a lot of ways to be better left. A couple would be offering e2ee and a less stringent ToS (technically anything other than normal HTML websites is not permitted, though I'm not aware of this ever being enforced, yet).

[NicoJuicy]

Cloudflare already has the bandwidth. I suppose tunnel doesn't cost much ( or even anything) compared to the rest since they pay for the size of the pipe.

When someone uses the tunnel, they never have to go outside of cloudflare. Since the traffic ( i suspect) would stay very local.

Perhaps it could be even cheaper in the end for them.

[anderspitman]

Good point, but they do still have to pay development costs for Cloudflare Tunnel.

[NicoJuicy]

That's why i explicitly mentioned the cost of the bandwidth.

I wasn't talking about the development/maintenance.