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Comment by athrowaway3z | Hacker News Reader

While I do support piracy. Services like Cloudflare already locked up most of the free internet you're imagining.

I see this and I don’t quite understand how. You don’t have to use their services. You can host your own whenever and wherever you’d like. The amount of providers now is greater than ever and even home internet connections are getting fast enough for some reasonable hosting.

It's not a complaint of how you (or I) can self-host and avoid Cloudflare, it's a complaint about how so many others use do Cloudflare. Especially what happens if Cloudflare doesn't like the way your IP address or browser look, or doubt your humanity.

This was my response as well. The number of people hosting websites that large numbers of people visit is much smaller than people of this forum would like to admit. The vast majority of web users don't visit Joe's self-hosted blog, they view Joe's content on the various social platforms. It doesn't make sense for Joe to host his own site.

Ok so if it doesn’t make sense for Joe to host his website because it’s just not interesting enough for people to visit then how is others using different CDNs than CloudFlare going to solve that?

We (or I, at least) aren't asking Joe Blogman to host his own site (though if he does, I'll cheer them on just the same). We're asking other, bigger sites, the ones that large groups of people visit, to avoid Cloudflare. These tend to be the "infrastructure" websites; the ones that, if you can't access them, you have a harder time that day because you have an actual task you have to do - and the company behind the website that Cloudflare is blocking you from, has reduced other avenues of completing the task because "customers can use the website".

It is in this way that Cloudflare is bad. It's bad for consumers being blocked because Cloudflare doesn't like their browser, IP, or local weather (because who the hell knows exactly why they're being blocked), and it's bad for businesses too: both competing CDNs that can't compete with CF's scale, and businesses that rely on CF but will be hit with a monopoly-sized price increase once Cloudflare's competition is extinct.

It makes perfect sense when Joe is blocked for disobeying the totalitarian hivemind and loses access to his accounts.

There are entire countries that you effectively block out by using Cloudflare on your websites, the very least is the countries embargoed by the US who Cloudflare aren't legally allowed to serve.

Besides that, Cloudflare is pretty aggressive with their captchas/blocks, and there been times where I, a resident of Spain, been blocked out because it's impossible to pass their captcha. I either have to give up and find some alternative service doing the same but without Cloudflare, or I try again another day and suddenly it works.

Even in the US I have had the same problem. I do what you do: just use another website that does the same thing. Having CAPTCHA on a website is a pretty hostile pattern and shouldn’t be a thing but that seems like it’s not the same thing as CloudFlare has ruined the internet.

As a host, you don't have to use their services for your site. As a visitor, you really don't have a choice as most sites you visit use CloudFlare.

How has this impacted you as a user and what did you do when it did?

Cloudflare told me they couldn't verify my browser was secure so I closed the tab.

So you saw a problem once, quit on the spot, and now want them as a company to go away?

May as well ask them if they're still beating their wife.

It has affected me from specific ISPs, e.g. running a desktop on a cloud server or browsing from hotel wifi etc. What I had to do is stop or switch to mobile data, there's not really any workaround or recourse when you hit the infinite CAPTCHA loop.

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