I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.

  • quixotic120@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Cloudflare has absolutely told websites to fuck off because they don’t like their content. They haven’t done it a ton of times but they absolutely have. No one cares because the sites they’ve done it to are toxic cesspool shitholes that, to be fair, the world is probably better off without. But each time it showed that cloudflare can simply wield its power if it feels like it.

    If your site becomes controversial in the future and is protected/hosted by cloudflare don’t be surprised if they suddenly send a letter saying “fuck off”. They’ve become arbiters of internet censorship and we have accepted it because the daily stormer and kiwi farms and 8chan are bad.

    The ridiculous part is all of those sites are still accessible; daily stormer and kiwi farms both still accessible from clearnet (iirc 8chan is tor only) so cloudflare dropping wasn’t even all that effective. Well funded hate speech found a way. But for the next ones that don’t have major alt right cash behind them to fund cloudflare alternatives they’ll just simply disappear. And then we will have the internet where corporations like cloudflare, who should absolutely be content agnostic, decide what we can and cannot see. You may think it’s fine right now because they’re doing it against websites that are admittedly gross and terrible, but what happens when they overstep and the line blurs?

    They should act like a proper tier 1 provider: find evidence of crossing a legal threshold, get a court order, and terminate service if something that bad has occurred. Anything less and they suck it up and honor the contract they signed. They haven’t, so fuck cloudflare. The internet is an amazing place but it’s also a disgusting abhorrent cesspool. Don’t get involved in hosting it if you can’t deal with that.