I can't shake the feeling that since its dealing with a huge amount of network traffic and it also strips SSL from every connection before passing it onto origins, they are a very juicy target for a certain three letter agency to place a tap.
The bit I'm less bothered about is the centralising effect it has on the internet.
They're still decrypting on their nodes, and then re-encrypting before sending to the origin. There's no getting around the fact they can see the traffic as plain text.
Is there a good alt to cloudflare? I don’t want to feed the beast but they are substantially better / cheaper for my use case (domain registrations and tiny websites)
incredibly weird first comment to post on HN, especially when nothing about this has anything to do with any configuration. the entire thing is about cloudflare's outsized role in controlling connectivity on the internet, which is very real.
just sort of a general complaint about how much the internet relies on cloudflare and what that means. massive point of failure, erratic browser checks & outright blocking, surveillance
What does your question imply about your position regarding what he said and what intent can be derived regarding your followup should he entertain your query?
I mean I think it speaks loudly that a lot of sites, blogs particularly, wouldn't feel so required to use a service like cloudflare if their viewer visible contents were just statically generated rather than requiring notable amounts of resources to compute each visit.
Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic, and saying that "they should have just used Cloudflare". Would Cloudflare caching the site have helped? Maybe/probably, but the user's point (visible on the github mirror https://github.com/jiakaiBot/deCloudflare/blob/89983e1501dbb...) has nothing to do with availability and everything to do with Cloudflare's position as a gatekeeper on the internet.
People who have been around for awhile should probably remember the days when every DDoS site on the internet was hosted behind Cloudflare and CF was notoriously slow about responding to abuse complaints or helping them get to the actual hosts on the other side. Or when Matthew went on a whole thing about how he had a moral obligation to provide services to literal nazis.
> Incredibly disappointing just how many comments are making fun of the site for not handling the traffic
Why? It's a deserved, obvious observation. If you're advocating a position but then demonstrate exactly the thing that counters your position, isn't that a worthwhile point? Of course everyone is going to point it out.
An HN front page simply isn't much traffic at all. It really isn't. The fact that so many sites still fall over is simply crazy in 2026. I don't even know how it's possible this is still such an issue. A Raspberry Pi 5 can host an HNing.
The site finally loaded for me, and seriously publishing content is such a ridiculous pattern. It's actually kind of funny that the whole site is falling over because someone decided to publish an opinion in a README, instead of putting it on an infinitely more appropriate static host (which can be built from that git).
In what way does their lack of traffic resilience demonstrate a counter to their position? Their position is not that load balancers and edge nodes are bad.
If I say I hate oversized trucks because one ran me over, my position is not countered by needing someone to deliver my couch.
> Redirect or block "Cloudflare Warp" users from accessing your website. And provide a reason if you can.
come on, really? what does this achieve? only thing i can think of is trying to get the user off of WARP, but i can pretty confidently say that before doing that i'll just not use the website. or if i really care about the content i'll turn it off until i'm done and back on it goes
Tangentially related, the archive.is / archive.today / etc site host used to block anyone using 1.1.1.1 DNS because 1.1.1.1 doesn't send an eDNS subnet to the authoritative DNS server. It accomplishes nothing except annoying actual users.
1. Good company starts, with good service and mission
2. Because company has good service and mission, company grows to control a majority of the market
3. Company realizes they can leverage their market for other means and sells their soul to the devil
4. People realize company is no longer good
5a. People leave company
-or-
5b. Company is now a monopoly and people can't leave
Sources: - Microsoft - Google - Others
Also love the irony of getting an HN hug of death w/o Cloudflare
The bit I'm less bothered about is the centralising effect it has on the internet.
What do you mean? You definitely can serve with TLS end-to-end with CF, it's called Full (strict) mode, or something like that.
> visit website
> mission accomplished
I wish life was that simple
but can you rebuke the message?
Just not the point you were trying to make.
I closed the tab after 1 minute of failing to load a readme.md.
" Ⓐnti-capitalist Free Software developer, trans rights are human rights, Black Lives Matter, abolish all prisons, 0xACAB "
People who have been around for awhile should probably remember the days when every DDoS site on the internet was hosted behind Cloudflare and CF was notoriously slow about responding to abuse complaints or helping them get to the actual hosts on the other side. Or when Matthew went on a whole thing about how he had a moral obligation to provide services to literal nazis.
Why? It's a deserved, obvious observation. If you're advocating a position but then demonstrate exactly the thing that counters your position, isn't that a worthwhile point? Of course everyone is going to point it out.
An HN front page simply isn't much traffic at all. It really isn't. The fact that so many sites still fall over is simply crazy in 2026. I don't even know how it's possible this is still such an issue. A Raspberry Pi 5 can host an HNing.
The site finally loaded for me, and seriously publishing content is such a ridiculous pattern. It's actually kind of funny that the whole site is falling over because someone decided to publish an opinion in a README, instead of putting it on an infinitely more appropriate static host (which can be built from that git).
If I say I hate oversized trucks because one ran me over, my position is not countered by needing someone to deliver my couch.
> Redirect or block "Cloudflare Warp" users from accessing your website. And provide a reason if you can.
come on, really? what does this achieve? only thing i can think of is trying to get the user off of WARP, but i can pretty confidently say that before doing that i'll just not use the website. or if i really care about the content i'll turn it off until i'm done and back on it goes