•  activistPnk   ( @activistPnk@slrpnk.net ) OP
    link
    fedilink
    English
    6
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I deliberately omitted those two. Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”. The sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world nodes should not be promoted because they are centralized (by two factors) and antithetical to the purpose of the fedi.

    • factor 1: disproportionate size thus concentration of power by those admins over an unacceptably large population.
    • factor 2: cloudflare, who currently decides who gets access to ~20—30% of all websites in the world. CF abuses their power and they marginalize several demographics of people (including poor people who live in regions where ISPs have to use CGNAT).

    So I suggest not feeding those communities. It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.

    It’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare’s breakage proliferates when CF’d nodes crosspost outside of their walled garden. E.g. if a CF-sourced image is crossposted to slrpnk.net, the image is inaccessible to me (and everyone else CF excludes) so I get a half missing post. Many people are here in the sufficiently decentralized portion of the fedi to escape abuses of concentrated power.

    •  ProdigalFrog   ( @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net ) 
      link
      fedilink
      English
      9
      edit-2
      7 months ago

      Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”

      I wouldn’t have known what you mean by that without context.

      factor 2: cloudflare

      I wonder if they would be interested in alternatives to cloudflare. I’m assuming it’s the easiest one to deploy, but they may be open to alternatives if it isn’t too much trouble to switch.

      • More often than not, admins are interested in alternatives. When they hear there are no gratis alternatives, they shut down. CF is deceptively gratis. That is, the gratis plan is for relatively low consumption. When a service comes under attack which then leverages the defense admins signed up for, Cloudflare taps them on the shoulder and says: hey, you’re exceeding the bandwidth of the gratis plan… time to switch to premium. So the “free” evaporates.

        Slightly more clever admins will use CF DNS and maintain their site in a non-proxied state (sparing their users from Cloudflare exclusion and over-sharing). Then when an attack hits they just have to flip a switch and CF is put into play. That switch can even be scripted to happen automatically.

        Even more clever admins (e.g. infosec.pub) are very knowledgeable about how to do security properly without offloading their security problems onto everyone else.

          •  activistPnk   ( @activistPnk@slrpnk.net ) OP
            link
            fedilink
            English
            4
            edit-2
            7 months ago

            I don’t really know the guy but I’m sure he is quite busy. He also runs infosec.exchange and a Threads-defederated variant of that, and an onion mirror, and fedia.io. fedia.io is on kbin/mbin and thus very buggy and he seems to put a lot of energy into chasing those bugs. IIRC he mentioned his bills are like $3k/month for one of or all of those nodes. Wouldn’t hurt to ask but the question should probably come direct from the interested admins. Maybe they could hire him.

        •  wahming   ( @wahming@monyet.cc ) 
          link
          fedilink
          English
          27 months ago

          The question would be, why bother? If they’re unmodded and nobody’s putting in any effort with them, what’s to be gained by taking them over rather than just focusing on this one?