[leokennis]

I think the question you need to ask is: who can build, maintain and operate the needed infrastructure for "task x" better? Cloudflare or you?

For many (most) use cases, CF will operate at a resilience and stability and professionality level far above what they can achieve themselves.

[teddyh]

Of course Cloudflare can do it better. That’s not the argument rixthefox presented. The problem rixthefox stated was that when Cloudflare does go down, they take half the internet with them at once.

[lijogdfljk]

Honest question, does that matter? Ie if we say that they can do it better than i can, hypothetically that means i'll have more downtime than them - yes? If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better. Assuming of course that they can handle the scale linearly, and that it doesn't cause them to have a worse uptime than if i hosted.

So the question seems to be does the internet going down at the same time outweigh the internet being down for larger periods in aggregate? I don't know, honestly - seems like a tossup.

Is there a better angle to view this from?

edit: My issues with centralization are more about privacy, incentives, points of authority/leaks/autonomy, etc. Downtime seems the least concerning to me.

[teddyh]

> Honest question, does that matter? Ie if we say that they can do it better than i can, hypothetically that means i'll have more downtime than them - yes?

Yes.

> If that's true for everyone, then the internet will, in aggregate, be down less with CF than if we distributed better.

That depends on what we define as “the internet”. If we use any single service as a point of measure, then “the internet” will have more downtime. But my desire to use the internet is very seldom to use one specific service. Instead, I want to accomplish a specific task, and if my usual service goes down, with any luck they will have a competitor which is still up. This is why I think this alternative is better; it will encourage competitors to exist, which will provide a level of redundancy above the simple network layer.

[monkpit]

This isn’t really a value proposition to any of the companies that are looking to use cloudflare.

When something big like AWS goes down, it’s just understood by users that stuff is all broken everywhere. It’s not really an opportunity to get more users just because your thing is still up during this huge outage.

On top of that, if the alternative is less reliable than CF, any marginal gain in users during that outage (users that were only interested in your service because it was still up) will again be lost during subsequent outages for the exact same reason.

[teddyh]

I was arguing from the point of view of an internet user. From the point of view of an individual service provider, of course it makes sense for them to use CF. But in aggregate, the widespread use of CF makes the internet worse.

[staticassertion]

We've seen AWS go down. It's sort of a "haha, look at how much broke" but mostly it's a bunch of images don't load and maybe a few communication apps like Slack fail. 99% of the sites that go down are sites that really don't matter at all.

Obviously if you need uptime better than AWS, don't use AWS, or use AWS and someone else. The reason people are fine accepting this is because the impact of "50% of the internet goes down" is hilariously unimpactful - 99% of the internet is just not anything to care about.

[leokennis]

So if I understand your reasoning correctly, you’d rather have 60 minutes of downtime per self hosted service per year (all at different times), than 60 minutes of downtime per decade for all these services at the same time (all fixed once CF fix their incident)?

[teddyh]

Yes. For each individual service outage, I’ll probably be able to find a replacement or do without that single service for a while. When ⅓ of all the internet goes down, that’s it; we’ll all just suffer for the duration.

It’s like with stocks. A single stock I own might go bust, but with a diversified portfolio, I won’t really care. But if ⅓ of all stocks go bust at the same time, that’s a market crash.