Fediverse controled by Cloudflare? ehmmm From GitHub, controlled by MS?
Maybe https://writefreely.org
this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2023
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This is scary I think. Is the fediverse that big already, that megacorps are trying to get in? :/
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
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!
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...)
@ada I’m old enough to remember embrace, extend, extinguish from Microsoft and can understand why people might be wary, but if the fediverse is to reach its full potential, then this stuff needs to be simple to deploy and right now it really isn’t.
There's at least one not cloudflare company doing this, though I think I forget their name. It might be yunohost.org, they definitely do provide mastodon hosting, but there might have been one that focused more specifically on hosting fediverse instances. I've heard testimonials for them saying they take the sysadmin work out of running instances, but I suspect most of these people already have some technical background so it's hard to say how helpful it really is.
I don't think it's really that important to have a highly streamlined deployment process, mostly because I don't really see the value in single-user or micro instances, but that's a matter of preference
@anova There are lots. I have my own mastodon instance with Spacebear.ee. They spin up an instance, make you the admin, and you just have to point DNS at it. They handle the software updates, etc.
Yeah, that's the bit that I'm expecting to make a difference. The ease of deployment and lack of infrastructure required will make it appealing to many people that might otherwise hesitate due to Cloudflare