This is likely a Lemmy bug but infosec.pub is related because there are so many Android communities that are federated from bad places so I thought I would mention it here as well.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/11060800

The cross-post mechanism has a limitation whereby you cannot simply enter a precise community to post to. Users are forced to search and select. When searching for “android” on infosec.pub within the cross-post page, the list of possible communities is totally clusterfucked with shitty centralized Cloudflare instances (lemmy world, sh itjust works, lemm ee, programming dev, etc). The list of these junk instances is so long [email protected] does not make it to the list.

The workaround is of course to just create a new post with the same contents. And that is what I will do.

There are multiple bugs here:
① First of all, when a list of communities is given in this context, the centralized instances should be listed last (at best) because they are antithetical to fedi philosophy.
② Subscribed communities should be listed first, at the top
③ Users should always be able to name a community in its full form, e.g.:

  • !android@hilariouschaos.com
  • hilariouschaos.com/android

④ Users should be able to name just the instance (e.g. hilariouschaos.com) and the search should populate with subscribed communities therein.

  • ZagorathEnglish
    21·
    7 months ago

    I know well how Cloudflare works. I’ve used it myself at work, and for my personal website. That website you linked clearly doesn’t use it, because it took about 5 seconds to load up despite being entirely text. That’s why it’s a good service.

    I find most of the criticisms it describes largely unconvincing in general, but particularly unconvincing in the fediverse. Yes, you can in fact access content on the fediverse without Cloudflare if you really want to. You can choose to use a different instance, and it doesn’t matter where that data is hosted. The fediverse is by design not a privacy-forward platform, so concerns about “content they expect to be private” don’t matter.

    It’s still decentralised because each instance is run by its own instance administrators with their own rules and capable of maintaining its own culture. This is the real goal of federation. Nothing about Cloudflare runs counter to that. Even if they were all hosted in the same data centre it would not be a large mark against the fediverse, though there would be some small risk of being deplatformed by the host. That risk exists with Cloudflare too, except that a site previously behind Cloudflare can choose to no longer use it far more easily than a site can move its hosting provider at short notice—plus Cloudflare has a history of being extremely slow to wield that power.

    • coffeeClean@infosec.pubOP
      11·
      7 months ago

      That website you linked clearly doesn’t use it, because it took about 5 seconds to load up despite being entirely text. That’s why it’s a good service.

      Selling your soul for a slightly faster load time is your personal preference but arbitrarily trading off inclusion of marginalized groups of people so some people get a faster load time is not in line with the netneutrality principles that the fedi community values. Diversity and inclusion trumps faster load times of some dude in Australia.

      Yes, you can in fact access content on the fediverse without Cloudflare if you really want to. You can choose to use a different instance, and it doesn’t matter where that data is hosted.

      That’s not true specifically for Lemmy. Images do not get copied. If a LemmyWorld user posts an image in a federated community, everything except the image is accessible on other instances. So those of us in Cloudflare’s excluded groups get a broken threads (people talking about an image we cannot see - we just see the discussion because only text is mirrored).

      Even if you are in CF’s included group of those permitted access, if you are on a measured rate uplink you would want to see the size of an image before downloading it. That is something else that Cloudflare breaks. There is no content-length HTTP header. So CF also discriminates against those on measured rate connections.

      There are also various other circumstances requiring users to visit a thread’s copy on another host. If that other host is Cloudflare, CF’s access restrictions determine whether the user gets access. If [email protected] needs to revisit an old thread to recall a link, and fedi-respecting.node had to delete the thread in a periodic cleanup to recover disk space, bob might need to access another node directly which hosted the same thread. Yes, I’ve been there. And if that other node is Cloudflared, bob will be blocked if he is in CF’s excluded groups.

      Cloudflare’s wall breaks the fedi in so many bizarre ways I should probably start a log of the various circumstances that CF causes enshitification to manifest.

      The fediverse is by design not a privacy-forward platform, so concerns about “content they expect to be private” don’t matter.

      That’s not true either. Cloudflare gets a view on all traffic, both public and private including access credentials. Users are deceived because of the lack of disclosures about the CF MitM. E.g. users commonly expect a DM to be visible to the admins of both hosts with no idea the Cloudflare also has visibility as well. Most users don’t even know about the existence of CF. Aussie.zone, for example, is not responsible enough to disclose to users that CF has that visibility.

      Of course it completely changes the equation when the same single corporation who has visibility on about half all web traffic in the world also has a view on people’s social media DMs and acct creds, it’s an all-eggs-in-one-basket kind of compromise. That abusive level of visibility increases in the extent of the compromise when all that data can be aggregated. So the centralised nature of just the data exposure alone makes it antithetical the fedi philosophy from a privacy standpoint, most particularly coupled with the masses being uninformed about it.

      It’s still decentralised because each instance is run by its own instance administrators with their own rules and capable of maintaining its own culture.

      Certainly not. It’s centralized by Cloudflare’s access controls on all Cloudflared nodes under a single corporate policy. What aussie.zone is doing is very rare. Cloudflared nodes run with CF’s default access controls, which blindly gives CF blanket centralized authority over who gets access. This goes directly against the purpose of federation philosophy.

      Even when a node like aussie.zone whitelists Tor, there are still half a dozen other demographics of people who they uniformly and centrally discriminate against and this is strictly under Cloudflare’s control and beyond the control of aussie.zone.

      Even if they were all hosted in the same data centre it would not be a large mark against the fediverse

      Of course it would. You have something like 5 of the 7 biggest fedi instances dependent on Cloudflare. If there is CF-wide downtime (regardless of whether it’s all on one data center or more realistically broken logic that’s distributed like cloudbleed was), the benefits of decentralization fails to deliver. Lack of network diversity makes disproportionately large number of people vulnerable to a single point of failure.