We seriously need to differentiate servers, otherwise the decentralization is useless.

  • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    18·
    15 hours ago

    Someone in another post showed a decent site that shows cloudflare dependency, so I threw the top 35 actives from observer into it. It’s honestly not as bad as I expected it would be, but it is concerning.

    Lemmy

    lemmy.world(Active Users: 14512): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    sh.itjust.works(Active Users: 2509): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    lemmy.ml(Active Users: 2087): Cloudflare? No

    lemmy.zip(Active Users: 1704): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    lemmy.dbzer0.com(Active Users: 1444): Cloudflare? No

    lemmy.ca(Active Users: 1381): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    lemmygrad.ml(Active Users: 972): Cloudflare? No

    lemmy.blahaj.zone(Active Users: 956): Cloudflare? No

    programming.dev(Active Users: 929): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    discuss.tchncs.de(Active Users: 778): Cloudflare? No

    sopuli.xyz(Active Users: 596): Cloudflare? No

    slrpnk.net(Active Users: 371): Cloudflare? No

    infosec.pub(Active Users: 331): Cloudflare? No

    lemmy.today(Active Users: 314): Cloudflare? No

    midwest.social(Active Users: 307): Cloudflare? No

    reddthat.com(Active Users: 292): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    feddit.nl(Active Users: 290): Cloudflare? No

    pawb.social(Active Users: 243): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    forum.guncadindex.com(Active Users: 234): Cloudflare? No

    mander.xyz(Active Users: 194): Cloudflare? No

    lemmings.world(Active Users: 177): Cloudflare? No

    ani.social(Active Users: 173): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    feddit.it(Active Users: 158): Cloudflare? No

    startrek.website(Active Users: 156): Cloudflare? No

    feddit.dk(Active Users: 151): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,cname)

    leminal.space(Active Users: 126): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    ttrpg.network(Active Users: 125): Cloudflare? No

    szmer.info(Active Users: 116): Cloudflare? No

    lemmy.eco.br(Active Users: 99): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)

    lemy.lol(Active Users: 97): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,cname)

    awful.systems(Active Users: 90): Cloudflare? No

    • Cricket [he/him]@lemmy.zipEnglish
      5·
      12 hours ago

      It looks like that source also didn’t list hexbear.net, which seems to be around the 5th or 6th largest Lemmy instance, at 1.57k monthly active users. Results from the site you linked (thanks, by the way) say that they use Cloudflare for DNS but not for CDN/Proxy/SSL.

      Hexbear and lemmynsfw aren’t listed on fedidb either, which leads me to believe that they must block whatever discovery mechanism is being used by these fedi stats sites.

      • Pika@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4·
        14 hours ago

        I used observer and sorted by active users, so maybe fediverse observer doesn’t host the instance due to the NSFW? idk

    • MalReynolds@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      14 hours ago

      FWIW I switched VPN egress to Singapore (I have two egress points up permanently and switch with foxyproxy) and was up again immediately.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    11·
    16 hours ago

    I mean, it’s easy to check whether a given instance is using CloudFlare.

    $ host lemmy.world|head -n1
lemmy.world has address 104.26.9.209
$ whois 104.26.9.209|grep ^NetName
NetName:        CLOUDFLARENET
$

    You can browse anonymously on any instance that permits doing so, so if you just want to browse during an outage, you can do that anywhere.

    IMHO, having an account on a second Threadiverse instance isn’t necessarily a terrible idea, not just because of CloudFlare outages, but because instances do have outages for various reasons. I have an account on olio.cafe (PieFed, not on CloudFlare) and on lemmy.today (Lemmy, not on CloudFlare) because I wanted to try out PieFed, and I have fallen back to that to post before if lemmy.today has issues.

    That being said, I didn’t intentionally try to avoid CloudFlare. I mean, they’re used by a lot of major sites, and I don’t expect them to have a lot of downtime. I mean, every Threadiverse instance has had downtime for some reason or another. I’ve had Internet outages, as well as electricity outages. Not all that common or usually an extended thing, but they happen.

    • passepartout@feddit.org
      9·
      17 hours ago

      I just came home and learned about the outage. Still can’t get the smirk of superiority out of my face from when I noticed my people were still able to shitpost in my absence.

      • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        17 hours ago

        I appreciate that different teams are doing different things, I’ll have to remember to drop by during the next cloudflare outage 😄

  • chunes@lemmy.world
    61·
    17 hours ago

    Say it with me again: your server does not need middlemen that can break your stuff whenever they feel like it.

    • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      13·
      16 hours ago

      So, there are a couple of reasons to use CloudFlare, but I suspect that the reason that a lot of people are doing so is to deal with DDoSes, which are hard to deal with otherwise.

      Like, my home instance, lemmy.today, doesn’t use CloudFlare, so it isn’t affected by a CloudFlare outage. But…it was also knocked offline for a few days about a month back by a DDoS.

      A lot of major sites do depend on CloudFlare, so they probably aren’t going to have a horrendous amount of downtime — like, any issue that comes up is probably gonna have a lot of engineers banging on it pretty quickly.