Centralization is bad for everyone everywhere.

That bring said… I just moved my homeserver to another city… and I plugged in the power, then I plugged in the ethernet, and that was the whole shebang.

Tunnels made it very easy. No port forwarding no dns configuration no firewall fiddling no nothing.

Why do they have to make it so so easy…

  • shiftymccool@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    5 months ago

    Why does Cloudflare get a pass on the “if it’s free, you’re the product” mantra of the self-hosting community? Honest question. They seem to provide a lot for free, so…

      • chiisana@lemmy.chiisana.netEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        Strictly speaking, they’re leveraging free users to increase the number of domains they have under their DNS service. This gives them a larger end-user reach, as it in turn makes ISPs hit their DNS servers more frequently. The increased usage better positions them to lead peering agreement discussions with ISPs. More peering agreements leads to overall cheaper bandwidth for their CDN and faster responses, which they can use as a selling point for their enterprise clients. The benefits are pretty universal, so is actually a good thing for everyone all around… that is unless you’re trying to become a competitor and get your own peering agreement setup, as it’d be quite a bit harder for you to acquire customers at the same scale/pace.

      • shiftymccool@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        5 months ago

        That makes sense, except Google kinda does the same thing. Everything they have is technically just a “free tier” of the Google One subscription, right? I guess I’m saying that “free tier of paid product” doesn’t automatically qualify a company as trustworthy for me. Is there something else that sets Cloudflare apart?

        • exanime@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          For me personally, it was all about balance.

          15 years ago, Gmail/Inbox was a great email client, the domain was great and popular (so no need to spell it out for people) and I would “pay” by getting ads based on my emails read by a bot.

          Now Gmail is a terrible email client, the best updates are ridiculous things like moving buttons around and it takes Google years to roll out. The thing loses emails, mislabels and misclassifies stuff and the rules work for a week then blow up. On top of that, google is now basically a proctologist considering how far up my ass they want to go

          The balance is broken… Google now officially sucks (IMO)

        • irotsoma@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          In my opinion, the difference with Google is that Google is actively using your data and you’re giving them a lot of it. For Cloudflare, what do they have exactly? Depends on what services you use, but really all they get from me is the list of servers that connect to my domains. Google does that too if you use 8.8.8.8, or if you have any of their hardware that overrides router DNS settings like Chromecast and Google TV.

        • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          5 months ago

          Quality of their products maybe? Cloudflare feels like they put a lot of effort into their product, Google not so much with how buggy everything is and how often they just abandon products they offer.

    • oyenyaaow@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      5 months ago

      They have for public benefit program where they give out their paid security tiers for free? If you can get recommended into it. Build a lot of goodwill there for non-profits community.