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…
DIY your own Cloudflare
Just stop supporting the biggest actor in the market.
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…
@shiftymccool @Kuvwert cause nobody wants to think about that.
Do you have an alternative to cloudflare tunnels? I’d love to hear it, because I’m also not really happy about relying on them either, but tailscale only works up to an extent because not all devices can connect to it and it’s a pain in the ass to get random family members to connect to it as well.
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.
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?
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)
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.
randomly came across these, so yeah.
edit: about this apparently https://archiveofourown.org/works/54711364
Well, centralization and giving up your freedoms, letting someone else control you, is always kinda easy. Same applies to all the other big tech companies and their platforms. I’d say it applies to other aspects of life, too.
And I’d say it’s not far off from the usual setup. If you had a port forward and DynDns like lots of people have, the Dns would automatically update, you’d need to make sure the port forward is activated if you got a new router, but that’s pretty much it.
But sure. if it’s too inconvenient to put in the 5 minutes of effort it requires to set up port forwarding everytime you move, I also don’t see an alternative to tunneling. Or you’d need to pay for a VPS.
It’s almost like the big tech companies are really good at their jobs…
Woah, let’s not be hasty. A few big tech companies are really good at their jobs…
Let’s not forget the dozens of big tech companies run by absolute morons that bring products that nobody wants or needs and only stay afloat due to legacy, stealing data & selling it, and/or venture capital.