this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
50 points (72.7% liked)
Technology
59232 readers
4455 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
@[email protected] being behind Cloudflare does not stop an instance being decentralised at all. I have a very small site that I can only afford a little money to host it. Although it is "behind" Cloudflare, it is hosted in the UK. That hosting is decentralised. Without a CDN my instance could not exist unless I had a ton of cash to pay for superfast hosting.
None of this makes my site "centralised".
While the hosting location may be decentralized, using Cloudflare introduces a level of centralization in the way Internet traffic is managed. Cloudflare acts as a central point through which all incoming traffic is routed before reaching your decentralized server. This centralization is evident in the fact that Cloudflare controls access to the site, providing security measures, CDN services and acting as a proxy server.
Without Cloudflare, hosting can indeed be decentralized, but the inclusion of this proxy service means that a central entity (Cloudflare) plays a key role in handling and directing traffic. This introduces a level of centralization to the overall service, even if the hosting itself remains decentralized.
And it will take me all of 60 seconds to turn off cloudflare on my instance I I ever have to and 5 min for TTL on the DNS to expire, bit in saying that I have moved from a small indipendent VPS to a much larger provider for cost saving (Mostly for storage, but also double the core count).