cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/3045
Now this is interesting. A Fediverse platform developed by Cloudflare that inherently runs on Cloudflare without needing dedicated infrastructure.
The code is open source yet the platform itself is inherently proprietary. It’s going to be very interesting how this unfolds given how unpopular Cloudflare is with many Fediverse admins
I’m not a fediverse admin, but I like to think that if I was I would find a way to automatically defederate with these cloudflare instances. Open source code doesn’t mean anything if it can only run on proprietary infrastructure.
More abstractly, I don’t feel like there’s inherently anything wrong with the sort of thing, but the fact that Cloudflare Corporation in particular is doing this rubs me the wrong way
fediverse as movement and ideology <> cloudflare is not going together, u right.
@anova Why would you ban yourself from interacting with someone who voluntarily chooses provider X or Y or Z for anything? That’s their choice, not yours.
Half the fediverse already runs on servers provided by only 3 companies. If anything, adding more to the mix, both implementations and hosting providers, is healthy for a decentralized ecosystem.
Why would you ban yourself from interacting with someone who voluntarily chooses provider X or Y or Z for anything?
Because I’m petty
Half the fediverse already runs on servers provided by only 3 companies
I also don’t know those three companies off the top of my head, and while I definitely believe you, I can’t imagine they are anywhere near as big as Cloudflare. If you’re talking about cloud service providers, I’d also consider running an instance that ignores say, AWS instances, but I think that’s a bit different since they don’t specifically provide “activitypub” services afaik. With Cloudflare, it’s much more explicit
@anova Same. If Amazon created their own ActivityPub implementation, that would be yet another one that has to interop with all the other implementations, thus creating a healthier, more diverse ecosystem. Now people are mostly just running Mastodon on AWS.
The Cloudflare move is important not because of their infra, but because it’s a new server implementation, which can only run on Cloudflare, thus always having to interop with other implementations (except for insular, corporate use cases).
is it really half? and which three companies?
Likely Hetzner, Netcup and OVH. Large relatively cheap VPS providers in Europe.
I remember reading an article some time ago about someone actually investigating that and there was also some large US hoster in the mix. but those few made up 80-90% of the fediverse instances.
Edit: found it: https://bitkeks.eu/blog/2020/03/underlying-problem-fediverse-decentralised-platforms.html
ah, i misread your initial post. i thought you meant half of all users were hosted by a few instances. thanks for that article!
Fediverse controled by Cloudflare? ehmmm From GitHub, controlled by MS?
Maybe https://writefreely.org
Hmm, obviously meant for single user instances and since you bring your own domain it is not total vendor lock-in.
As a normal Fediverse user you will not even interact with cloudflare servers directly, but only your hopefully non-cloudflare hosted fediverse instance does.
Personally I would not use it, but I can see its appeal. And its not like other VPS hosts are completely free of proprietary software.
since you bring your own domain it is not total vendor lock-in
sure you can point your domain elsewhere, but i don’t see anything about the ability to export your data in a way that lets you actually migrate to something else (though i think that is arguably required by GDPR…)
This is scary I think. Is the fediverse that big already, that megacorps are trying to get in? :/
Now do one for lemmy!