I remember the day I went why are we all selfhosting and still relying on a site like Cloudflare?.
I’m glad I agreed with me on it.
this “me” character is so smart, aren’t they
Oh, he’s the best. Keeps me out of trouble, that one.
I’ve migrated about half of my services off of cloudflare DNS proxy. Guess which half still worked this afternoon. (Self hosting pangolin with CrowdSec as replacement). I wasn’t even using the cloudflare tunnel. Just their proxy for some bot mitigation.
been really enjoying pangolin so far! i got scared and ended up not installing crowdsec.
am i missing out? how hard would that be to add after the fact?
Can’t speak to how difficult it would be to do after the fact. My guess is just adding in the lines in the docker compose. As for CrowdSec, it seems to run in the background and I haven’t looked at it much. I’ve triggered it a few times and locked myself out. So I’ve added my home IP to the whitelist (it’s running on a VPS). It also locked out my uptime Kuma so I whitelisted that too.
I use it for DNS and domain hosting, but that’s it, none of their proxying stuff.
Why though? You have other options less detrimental to the internet than using and supporting them…
Domain registration and renewal is at cost, and DNS is free. I’m not sure what’s detrimental to the internet about that…
My paid hosting is elsewhere, so they’re not making any money off me.
For me it’s because it’s free, easy to use, and supported by ddclient.
still hard. most projects still CDN online instead of packaging into a single application.
it’s one of the most infuriating things about self-hosting. so I made my own self-hosted CDN and have rewrite rules that replace most public cdb domains and reroute them to my own local.
it would be great if I could just have something in the middle that would download once and cache locally on request, but it’s effort that would be taken from my time afk.
By self-hosted you mean you have hardware geographically distributed? Like… boxes at friend’s houses or…?
no, self-hosted meaning it’s all on the local network. it’s just a folder on NAS that has a local DNS route to it.
rewrite rules that rewrite the HTML and replaces “cdn.stuff.com” to “mycdn.local.net”.
so not a true CDN, but a mock.
I used Cloudflare tunneling for a while, then started to have similar thoughts. I’m off Cloudflare now.
c/selfhosted having a field day rn
Yeah, wonder how those cloudflare(d) tunnels werd keeping up.
Dafuq is a character.ai and why is it in the same list as google and cloudflare? Like yea my local grocery store had some issues should that be on the list too?
An AI chatbot that pretends to be a character and you roleplay with it.
Back in my day, we just told Cleverbot to suck our dicks
Had to include something AI because of the craze, probably picked at random
It is very used actually. There’s a lot of lonely people… :(
(I don’t use it tho, I just yell at the void on Fedi)
Honestly, I didn’t even notice.
I actually enjoy when this happens. All this centralized shit will not end well.
Centralized is control. Control is profit. It’s already not “well”, that’s why we’re here discussing it.
Another reason to self host 😊
I’m pretty sure cloudflare has better uptime than you
This is dumb…
If you self host and your power goes out …
Think about it
…My UPS kicks in.
Lol the power is out and this guy thinks he’s gonna get overnight deliveries smh
/s
See, there’s still a niche for the internal combustion engine over electric. Good luck driving your tesla in a blackout!
Maybe this guy lives in an area immune to random outages ? Never any power shutdown, internet disconnection or slowness. And his hardware never fails too 🫢
I prefer less uptime at saturday over a random rare outage.
I do agree , the web needs to be decentralized, but does your server have similar uptime to cloudflare.
Does it need to?
No but then the argument above falls flat, doesn’t it?
Uh huh, just before a major democracy attacked an evil, evil country. Must be coincidence.
Everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works
So tell me, how does the world work? We all hold hands and hug and cry together?
I’m gonna Kum ba yah so hard, you won’t be able to stop me!
Maybe I don’t want you to stop, big boy.
eventually
You’re funny.
And that other huge democracy ongoing attacks on its own cities and economy.
Well that was fun!
??? My shit is working.
Strangely enough, twitch streams and chat were working fine but everything else was broken, had an empty following list.
It’s seen tech talks by Twitch’s engineering team. Some of those folks are scary smart.
Not that it takes that much cleverness to avoid using CloudFlare, of course.
But might be related. Twitch had some clever fallbacks and work-arounds for slow Internet, in that tech talk.
Good, we have a reason to touch grass now
Oh no, not Cloudflare!
Oh right I use NextDNS, so anyway…
Oh, its also Google, Twitch, Discord and Etsy… and some AI girlfriend generator… and Spotify?
… People still use those? Aren’t they worried about all the security and privacy concerns, the exploitative business models?
No?
Huh. Well, dang, sucks for those users I guess.
Ahem, annnyyyywaaaayyyy…
…
Ok, serious mode / tinfoil hat:
… Did maybe someone in the Trump admin just try to do a US internet blackout, given all the insane shit happening, and pulled a few wrong cords out?
…
Either way… and I cannot believe I am citing Ready Player One as a positive example of anything, but such is the nature of our collective degeneracy:
Tuesdays and Thursdays are now no internet days.
Go outside, touch grass, realize you’re addicted to social media like a drug, and begin detoxing.
…
EDIT: Holy shit, Israel just struck Iran at multiple locations, presumably all or many related to their nuclear program… including Tehran.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/06/12/world/israel-iran-us-nuclear
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/13/israel-strike-iran-trump-nuclear-talks
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/israel-iran-strike-conflict
info blackout tinfoilhattery intensifies
Owhooo your virtual girl friend is offline!
Jokes on you, my virtual girlfriend runs locally!
No, she’s just ghosting you.
realize you’re addicted to social media like a drug
Lemmy included.
Speaking as someone who managed to quit smoking, but still uses a vape, who is focusing on doing daily PT after being maimed a while back…
A step in the right direction is a step in the right direction, and taking one step at a time is better than none.
Lemmy ain’t corporate like Reddit, it ain’t parasocial, only a very small number of users actually directly link their real identity to their psuedonym, and it doesn’t have a worldclass datamining/profiling algo perfecting what content to feed to specifically you, to make you angry or insecure enough to keep you engaged.
Perfect?
No.
Leagues better than every alternative?
Far as I can tell, yes.
Fundamentally, the brain still receives “bite-size-chocolate” dopamine hits from Lemmy by receiving positive affirmations from upvotes, cortisol from downvotes, and lends to dark behavior patterns like any forum. Adrenaline dumps when engaged in “online arguments”.
The nature of both anonymous or personally identifiable online forums’ neurochemical stimulation of our over-sized and over-active (but evolutionarily necessary for our ancestors’ survival) amygdala fosters social media addiction.
People like Lemmy for many reasons. Some of them are good. However, let’s not pretend that it’s “all of the good with none of the bad.” It’s healthy to be skeptical of Lemmy instances too. Screen time is the enemy.
Yeah, a great part of Lemmy’s fundamental design is that it gives the user so much ability to block specific toxic users and communities and even entire instances from being seen by that user.
A user who is interested in self regulating or limiting that potential adrenaline overload … is aided by Lemmy in doing so.
This is significantly different from how its nearest equivalent, reddit, operated untill about 2 years ago, when they finally added an actual block user ability.
Still don’t think you can block the entire user group of subreddit communities, the way you can block an an entire Lemmy instance, if you want to.
(At least not without some third party script or software… which are probably all broken by now given how hard reddit is cracking down on its API?)
Also, moderation and admin logs are significantly less opague than on reddit.
To the best of my knowledge, on lemmy, you can’t admin edit the post of someone you are arguing with to frame them, basically, and then turn them into a strawman of themselves, and then win that argument with them, and then ban them… as has happened on reddit.
Also Also, … lemmy at least not yet does not appear to have a problem with a massive flood of ai bots posting god knows what % of the actual content.
…
Not saying Lemmy is perfect.
I’m saying its better.
And I guess I’m also saying there’s a difference between being an alcoholic and enjoying an occasional drink from time to time.
Generally: Yes, of course, approach any online messsge board or social media with caution and skepticism… but different platforms can be significantly more conducive to generating negative mental health outcomes than others…
… short form video platforms collapse your attention span, anything that allows advertisements or ‘influencers’ who are basically just walking talking brand ambassadors lie to you to sell you all kinds of bs…
Thats not present on lemmy, at least not that I’ve seen… so in those ways, lemmy is the marijuana to say Tiktok’s fentanyl.
Character.ai being mentioned in the same line is a sign of the times.
The people yearn for the digital anime waifus
If you’re not running your waifu on a local machine she’s just a digital prostitute.
The one downvote on this comment makes it like 20x funnier
When you stop using a search engine and use AI-generated responses for everything, I guess having your LLM backends go down could qualify as having a disruptive functional impact.
A disruption to disfunctional search engines does not sound bad.
Well, the actual headline is:
Massive internet outage: Google services, Cloudflare, Spotify all down, users report
Character.ai is only mentioned in the lengthy list of services that are down.
Still a very important service for many people who are alone.😢
Self host your desperation.
Massive internet outage reported: Google, Cloudflare, Twitch all down
It even swapped in Twitch when I read it at the time. Headlines be changing.
And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?
Oh shit, a fellow FDE-head in the wild… What do you think of the latest Bad Dragons they just got in? I got one for 50% off, and it was only slightly used by Frank.
Ai? Or a catch headline
It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.
You could just google it-
oh wait
What is character.ai? Have I been living under a stone? When I visit the page I have to log in just to learn what it is?
It’s LLMs for ERP
… What’s ERP? Or don’t I want to know?
I put on my robe and wizard hat
Is that a bash reference? Jesus im old
Enterprise resource planning
Erotic resource planning
That’s how I read it too at first- and as bad as ‘erotic role play’ with a LLM chatbot sounds, the other one is so much horribly worse.
Actually RP and by proxy ERP is basically a perfect fit for what LLM are good at.
Good RP is basically nothing but improv and rolling with a functional scenario no matter how weird it gets. Which LLM are fantastic at doing.
You arnt worried about accuracy or memory after all. Just that it can string together coherent English and play pretend with you. Literally the ideal use case for a LLM.
My front-line guess is “Erotic Role Play” but I am not familiar with character.ai
I had guessed the nature of the site and “roleplay.” It is a tad silly on my part to not have guessed “erotic”; thanks for getting me there (and not in an erotic way).
edit: Had left out the word “there.”
Ohh that’s why everything is slow and this is my sanity check.
But its scary how if Cloudflare went down most popular websites will go down with it
Cloudflare is a cancer
Most people who dislike cloudflare do so for their centralization of the internet, rightly so.
Me? I HATE THE STUPID “VERIFYING YOUR REQUEST” PROMPTS. THEY TAKE WAYYY TOO LONG AND DONT WORK WITH MY USER AGENT SWITCHER. STUPID WEBSITES WITH 3 MONTHLY USERS ARE TURNING ON ADVANCED “DDOS PROTECTION” JUST TO MAKE EVERY FUNCTION OF THEIR APP TAKE 18 MONTHS
You can try https://github.com/FlareSolverr/FlareSolverr
Interesting, I have a lot less problems with the Cloudflare verification, than with Google captchas. The slightest unusual thing seems to put you in captcha hell
When I get to that screen, I just x out most of the time. It’s usually not that important.
tell me more
It blocks anyone not using one of its preferred browsers, among other things. It’s become the gatekeeper for a large fraction of the Internet.
It also flags my DNS filter and nearly every site I go to has to “check if I’m human”
What browsers does it block?
Minority browsers. Since I daily drive Pale Moon, I’m among the people affected. It’s suspected that they test only the 3-4 most popular browsers, and whether anything else works with their code is up to luck.
You may think browsers with tiny market shares aren’t important, but all new browsers start out that way. I fear for Ladybird if it ever makes it past the alpha stage, for instance.
I’m super interested in alternative browsers but never have the time to test them. I always wonder what the Internet would be like if we built it from scratch right now instead of having the legacy of 30 years of development to support.
He is not wrong. Look the whole internet is basically one centralized cloudflare if we continue this path.
great article, and I had no idea that happened to Brian Krebs, of all people! o.O
I do think the EFF makes a good point though, and I think personally I tend to be biased towards content neutrality over moderation (at least, more strongly the larger the platform is, and Cloudflare is very large). Not to the point of Xitter, obviously, but I think there’s at least a reasonable argument for Cloudflare in this case.
that said, after some searching, I did find the following two articles, and I find their arguments against Cloudflare very compelling:
- https://www.devever.net/~hl/cloudflare
- http://cryto.net/~joepie91/blog/2016/07/14/cloudflare-we-have-a-problem/
Fortunately I’m already using end-to-end SSL certs via Caddy, but now I’m considering just moving off Cloudflare entirely and instead providing regular backups to Internet Archive–most of the stuff I host is entirely static and very lightweight.
Like the bad kind
