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- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? - Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with the

- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? - Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with their policies. - What kind of support are they supposed to give their competitors that they aren't?

yucky 4y ago
>- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? IPFS? Internet Computer? I know HN hates crypto, but isn't this one of it's main use cases?
- rsstack 4y ago
  Won't share my opinion on crypto, but concretely: I believe IPFS only serves static contents (which is what CDNs did a couple of decades ago) and doesn't serve web traffic directly due to latency and throughput limitations without a "centralized" CDN, such a Cloudflare https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/reference/updating-for-ipfs/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/referenc....
  - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
    IPFS does serve traffic directly, and faster than through Cloudflare; if you run a local node. It accomplishes this by pre-caching content related to the content you access. So it is a bit network heavy. But I've been using it for about a year and the speed just can't be beat. https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/
    - rsstack 4y ago
      Who needs to run the local node? The website owner or the website visitor? (I never used IPFS.)
      - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
        Nobody needs to run a local node because there are proxies like Cloudflare. You've probably "used" IPFS without knowing it. That said, visitors/people browsing the web can run a local node. A browser add-on overwrites proxy URLs to point at your local node. Another way to think of it is that a local node is essentially your own personal CDN edge cache. Cloudflare's closest edge cache might be 20ms away. But if you run your own, it's just 0.2ms away! The web browsing experience, while running a local node, is virtually unchanged. You may simply notice some speed ups loading content which makes heavy use of IPFS (which I regularly do, since most DApps use IPFS extensively).
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  Wouldn’t you have to put an http gateway in front of those things anyways for your users?
  - yucky 4y ago
    I'm not an expert, but I think as long as users use an advanced browser like Brave or Opera it will handle more protocols than just http (such as IPFS based websites) seamlessly. Not sure if Chrome has any support beyond extensions.
Anunayj 4y ago
I think your second point clearly explains OPs problems with CloudFlare, they're not asking you to move off Cloudflare, they themselves do not like it's core values, and would rather use some other CDN.
- rsstack 4y ago
  Which OP? OP who posted the original question? I don't see that they state why. I also don't see reasons in the comments. They could have other reasons. Which is fine, they asked a concrete question and they don't owe us reasons. GP, who I'm replying to, stated some opinions on why one might wish to move off Cloudflare. I'm asking for clarifications on these vaguely stated opinions. If their only concern is the values, that's fine and it's why I didn't ask any clarifying question on that item. I asked questions about the two _other_ items. I'll note that I am not a Cloudflare customer and haven't been since ~2019, just due to getting quoted lower rates by a competitor and our AE didn't want to or couldn't match. No one can ask me to move off Cloudflare at this point :)
MacsHeadroom 4y ago
> Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with their policies Yes, thank you for making my argument for me? > How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? A CDN could not be centralized in the market by having meaningful competition. Cloudflare is in front of 80% of the Alexa top 1 million sites. That's a lot of eggs in one basket. > What kind of support are they supposed to give their competitors that they aren't? That's my bad. I meant that using Cloudflare is not supporting their competitors. For what it's worth, I use Cloudflare for half a dozen sites. But I also run a local IPFS node (a decentralized CDN) because it fetches IPFS hosted content faster than the Cloudflare IPFS proxy does and because I don't like my own traffic being beholden to Cloudflare if I can help it.
- rsstack 4y ago
  I'll just comment on this: > Yes, thank you for making my argument for me? Agreement isn't "making your argument for you". It is agreeing with your opinion. When discussing things with people, you often agree with things that they say - hopefully.
afiori 4y ago
> How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? When people complain about centralization with CF the POV is not that CF is centralized in itself, but that much of the internet is centralized around CF.

yucky 4y ago

>- How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? IPFS? Internet Computer? I know HN hates crypto, but isn't this one of it's main use cases?

rsstack 4y ago
Won't share my opinion on crypto, but concretely: I believe IPFS only serves static contents (which is what CDNs did a couple of decades ago) and doesn't serve web traffic directly due to latency and throughput limitations without a "centralized" CDN, such a Cloudflare https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/reference/updating-for-ipfs/ https://developers.cloudflare.com/web3/ipfs-gateway/referenc....
- MacsHeadroom 4y ago
  IPFS does serve traffic directly, and faster than through Cloudflare; if you run a local node. It accomplishes this by pre-caching content related to the content you access. So it is a bit network heavy. But I've been using it for about a year and the speed just can't be beat. https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/ https://docs.ipfs.tech/install/ipfs-desktop/
  - rsstack 4y ago
    Who needs to run the local node? The website owner or the website visitor? (I never used IPFS.)
    - MacsHeadroom 4y ago
      Nobody needs to run a local node because there are proxies like Cloudflare. You've probably "used" IPFS without knowing it. That said, visitors/people browsing the web can run a local node. A browser add-on overwrites proxy URLs to point at your local node. Another way to think of it is that a local node is essentially your own personal CDN edge cache. Cloudflare's closest edge cache might be 20ms away. But if you run your own, it's just 0.2ms away! The web browsing experience, while running a local node, is virtually unchanged. You may simply notice some speed ups loading content which makes heavy use of IPFS (which I regularly do, since most DApps use IPFS extensively).
hombre_fatal 4y ago
Wouldn’t you have to put an http gateway in front of those things anyways for your users?
- yucky 4y ago
  I'm not an expert, but I think as long as users use an advanced browser like Brave or Opera it will handle more protocols than just http (such as IPFS based websites) seamlessly. Not sure if Chrome has any support beyond extensions.

Anunayj 4y ago

I think your second point clearly explains OPs problems with CloudFlare, they're not asking you to move off Cloudflare, they themselves do not like it's core values, and would rather use some other CDN.

rsstack 4y ago
Which OP? OP who posted the original question? I don't see that they state why. I also don't see reasons in the comments. They could have other reasons. Which is fine, they asked a concrete question and they don't owe us reasons. GP, who I'm replying to, stated some opinions on why one might wish to move off Cloudflare. I'm asking for clarifications on these vaguely stated opinions. If their only concern is the values, that's fine and it's why I didn't ask any clarifying question on that item. I asked questions about the two _other_ items. I'll note that I am not a Cloudflare customer and haven't been since ~2019, just due to getting quoted lower rates by a competitor and our AE didn't want to or couldn't match. No one can ask me to move off Cloudflare at this point :)

MacsHeadroom 4y ago

> Your business, your values, you're of course free to ignore Cloudflare if you disagree with their policies Yes, thank you for making my argument for me? > How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? A CDN could not be centralized in the market by having meaningful competition. Cloudflare is in front of 80% of the Alexa top 1 million sites. That's a lot of eggs in one basket. > What kind of support are they supposed to give their competitors that they aren't? That's my bad. I meant that using Cloudflare is not supporting their competitors. For what it's worth, I use Cloudflare for half a dozen sites. But I also run a local IPFS node (a decentralized CDN) because it fetches IPFS hosted content faster than the Cloudflare IPFS proxy does and because I don't like my own traffic being beholden to Cloudflare if I can help it.

rsstack 4y ago
I'll just comment on this: > Yes, thank you for making my argument for me? Agreement isn't "making your argument for you". It is agreeing with your opinion. When discussing things with people, you often agree with things that they say - hopefully.

afiori 4y ago

> How can a business, specifically a CDN, not be centralized? When people complain about centralization with CF the POV is not that CF is centralized in itself, but that much of the internet is centralized around CF.