this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
256 points (96.0% liked)

Technology

75406 readers
1661 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

based cloudflare

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] pastermil@sh.itjust.works 3 points 9 hours ago (3 children)

Ladybird instead of Servo? And then some obscure desktop environment? What the fuck are they even trying to achieve here? We already got some big names and they're betting on the small ones?

[–] octoblade@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Ladybird has ambitions of being an actual end-user browser, servo seems to only have ambitions of being a browser engine.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 15 minutes ago* (last edited 13 minutes ago)

Swrvo seems more useful to me. Think Chromium and Webkit.

[–] shaytan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 hours ago

Ladybird has been a serious competitor for months, and its ideology is excedingly good and user-oriented, so thats why

Idk why they sponsored Omarchy, but it looks cool, altough I dont see what they'll get from that

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 7 points 7 hours ago

Omarchy is a Linux distro.

And I think ladybird is a bit larger of a project than servo, and they can't sponsor every single browser engine.

[–] RedPandaRaider@feddit.org 54 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

Cloudflare PR. Fuck them. Blocking VPNs from accessing websites is very open web of you.

[–] tekato@lemmy.world 57 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

Cloudflare blocks VPNs at the request of whoever is running the server. There are tons of websites running on Cloudflare that work with VPNs.

[–] IphtashuFitz@lemmy.world 10 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

Exactly. My employer uses Akamai, which is larger than Cloudflare. Akamai provides the ability to block traffic from Tor, traffic from VPNs, traffic from any countries you desire, and so on. They also provide managed lists of countries listed in things like ITAR so you can easily block them if you want.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 13 points 17 hours ago

There are also many Lemmy instances that are intentionally blocking VPNs because they have to to stay afloat.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] AmbiguousProps@lemmy.today 12 points 16 hours ago

I'm using a VPN with my cloudflare reverse proxies right now. That blocking is configured by the website owners, not Cloudflare.

[–] MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

For what it's worth when you set up your site on cloudflare you get to choose how strict you want security to be and what URLs it applies to, or just disable it and use it only as a CDN. Or even disable routing entirely and use it only as your DNS.

It would be nice if they were more clear that enabling some features might block legitimate users though.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 19 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Cloudflare doesnt want an open web, wtf.... More ridiculous fake posturing from big tech.

[–] Evotech@lemmy.world 28 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

I think they do

If everything is big tech and walled gardens what it's cloud flares role?

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] barnaclebutt@lemmy.world 17 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (3 children)

Why does CloudFlare not want an open web? I don't know why they care. Can someone please explain? Is it because they sometimes block VPNs?

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 30 points 14 hours ago

They do.

The basis for the FUD is that Cloudflare controls a lot of the web since they're used as a CDN, DDOS mitigation, domain registration, etc. However, what the FUD fails to mention is they don't provide most of the infrastructure for the web, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure totally dwarf their footprint. DDOS protection and whatnot may be provided largely by Cloudflare, but not the rest of the web stack.

Cloudflare very much doesn't want one or two companies to dominate the web because that'll kill their business model. The more diversity there is on the web, the more attractive their services are, because people are willing to pay for things to just work.

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 17 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

I can explain. Cloudflare does not block VPNs, some website owners choose to block VPNs using Cloudflare services.

Cloudflare itself is very open to VPNs, like you can use their free services to proxy your VPN over their network bypassing country providers blocking. You'll have to pay a lot for such service in Amazon or Azure.

So their business model is that poor people can receive cool services for free providing marketing for their business clients to pay for even better services. And they do provide cool services for free and even better services for reasonable payments.

Closed web means Google, Amazon and Azure own their business and the web. They don't want that neither in business sense nor in moral sense.

Edit. I'd like to emphasise that Cloudflare is the only CDN that provides their basic services for free to common people, making the web available to common people, making the web more free.

I've seen a couple of threads here where people shit on Cloudflare(including this one). They are stupid, don't know how the web works and are out of their minds.

[–] planish@sh.itjust.works 10 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

Cloudflare wants the web to be made of web pages. But they also have an interest in the web being at least slightly dangerous (so there's an incentive to buy their protection services), and at least somewhat hard to make work well when served from a potato (so there's an incentive to use their CDN to shave off those milliseconds of latency). And, as a large provider of excellent and often free services, they end up as an administrative single point of failure and thus a potential point of control. It's a lot easier to wiretap one Cloudflare DoH resolver than thousands of ISP routers across dozens of ISPs, for example.

None of this is because Cloudflare is somehow Bad People; they're powerful and thus dangerous, but not, as far as I can tell, evil. The worst thing about them seems to be that they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis, which looks like it might be an incorrect position that is possible to support with arguments.

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 2 points 8 hours ago

they'd prefer to stay out of content moderation completely rather than try to find and boot all the Nazis

With how loose this word(and others) is used nowadays by people from Israel, USA, Russia, Africa and maybe other countries I prefer Cloudflare to stay that way.

[–] dubyakay@lemmy.ca 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

They are the equivalent of the Dune universe's Spacing Guild.

[–] snoons@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago

They who control the MLP fanfic, controls the webiverse.

[–] moseschrute@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago

Idk, but a lot of Lemmy instances also don’t play nice with VPNs. Some of them are using Cloudflare, but idk if all the ones blocking VPNs are the ones using Cloudflare. But bot traffic is a big problem, and Cloudflare poses a solution to that. It’s not the ony solution, but it is a pretty good one.

You can’t really have a free social media network and not have it block VPNs. At least not with large public instances.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 29 points 22 hours ago (1 children)
[–] UnmetPlayer@lemmy.world 5 points 13 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 6 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

How can people not see that any single corporation standing between us and 20% of the entire interweb is a bad thing? You think this time they are going to turn out to be the good guys?

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 1 points 45 minutes ago

Why blame Cloudflare though? Make your own service or push other companies to offer their services for free like Cloudflare. If Cloudflare is "fucked" like you want to, do you think the web will become more free? No, those 20% of the web will either be gone(because it's not free anymore), or will move to those really big corps that own the other 80% of the web.

[–] shaytan@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 2 hours ago

What's the alternative to survive all the attacks and bots cloudflare blocks?

[–] sorter_plainview@lemmy.today 31 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (1 children)

Isn't Ladybird adopting Swift as their preferred language? I'm slightly confused on why Ladybird over Servo. But I am sure people at Cloudflare have more knowledge than me. So I guess there is a good reason.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 23 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Yep, they're moving from C++ to swift.

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 18 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

How does that work?

Working with raw buffers and memory in Swift is a frustrating experience.

I’m a big fan of Swift, but when I drop to systems level I don’t feel it’s a good fit.

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 14 points 21 hours ago (2 children)
[–] duckofdeath87@lemmy.world 9 points 14 hours ago (1 children)
[–] lena@gregtech.eu 3 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks, I couldn't figure out how to convert the x.com URL to xcancel. Do you just change the domain?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 37 points 23 hours ago (3 children)
[–] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 35 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (3 children)

Perhaps Servo isn't apolitical enough. 🥹

Remember, technology is political and our major technology-related problems are political, not technological. We wouldn't be building alternative browsing engines if Chromium was a community-built project, unaffiliated with an ad company.

E: FWIW, this comment suggest the initial political Ladybird snafu may have been remediated.

[–] Blisterexe@lemmy.zip 30 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (14 children)

I think that kinda weird and bad statement from the ladybird lead makes way more sense when you realize that his first language is german.

German, like other gendered languages, uses the male gender for an unknown person, using a genderless pronoun like "they" in german is a deliberate political stance that would prompt debate and is unusual and, frankly, weird, since the male pronoun is used as a neutral one.

Given that he apologized and changed it to they later, and no other incident of the sort happened since, I personally am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

The ladybird contributing guidelines currently read:

Use gender-neutral pronouns, except when referring to a specific person.

load more comments (14 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] TheOneCurly@feddit.online 15 points 22 hours ago

They don't appear to be sponsoring that one

[–] TuxEnthusiast@sopuli.xyz 19 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Cloudflare alternatives anyone?

[–] lena@gregtech.eu 23 points 21 hours ago

I'd say Bunny CDN is pretty good, but here's a more complete list: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/cloudflare

load more comments
view more: next ›