[solumunus]

> Hacker news is so funny, they complain about the amount of power we've allowed Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to have, and then go right around and recommend putting everything behind Cloudflare.

It’s almost as if those saying contradictory things are actually different people despite being on the same website. But it can’t be that, surely? Truly a perplexing phenomenon that I hope someone can one day explain.

[418tpot]

Fair, although I know quite a few people that hold both of these opinions simultaneously because I've met them in person. It's only after I point out their hypocrisy do they even realize what a danger Cloudflare poses to the free and open internet.

I suspect it's because hating on Google is in vogue, and so is recommending Cloudflare.

[BLKNSLVR]

I'm going to try to provide / justify my potentially hypocritical viewpoint:

I use Cloudflare (free tier) in front of the very few and almost entirely unused websites that I run. I believe that the service they provide is useful for protecting the IP addresses of the servers on which the content is hosted, whilst also providing some amount of protection from malicious traffic.

I also agree that centralisation of services is a big problem for the future of the internet.

My position is that, whilst there seem to be increasing voices / examples of Cloudflare's (potential in) acting against the nebulous notion of "spirit of the internet", for me they certainly haven't reached the "evil" stage. I'm also of the understanding that it's Cloudflare customers that choose to block access from Tor or VPS IP address ranges and / or add Captcha's or other bothersome verification. True Cloudflare enable it and make it possible, but the administrators of the website that you're trying to visit have made the choice to make it more difficult for you to access their content; not Cloudflare themselves.

I would prefer there to be similar-scale alternatives to Cloudflare as a kind of a middle-ground decentralisation of centralisation. I'm sure there are alternatives, but I'm not yet motivated enough to even consider starting the research process.

If Cloudflare start selling visitor analytics to data brokers, however, very fast goodbye.

[jopsen]

Given how Cloudflare works I imagine that there are alternative services offering the same thing.

Probably not as cheap. AWS can put a WAF and CDN infront of your site too.

And migrating from one service to another isn't much more work than moving DNS records.

Just saying, it's not the same level of vendor lockin as using dynamodb or whatever.