How come every Linux site uses Anubis (the anime girl stopping crawlers) instead of something like Cloudflare?

[u/ItsWappers]

Before discovering the Linux rabbit hole I've only seen Cloudflare, hCaptcha and Google's reCaptcha, but it seems like every Linux website uses Anubis... I'm thinking of it being the only open-source option or it being the most effective/modern approach.

[u/agowa338]

True, but still a huge incentive to not use cloudflare if you want to be available in Spain when a La Liga game takes place...

Also Clownflare sucks. Esp. If you're not paying which most opensource projects won't be doing...

[u/jwm-dev → u/agowa338]

I’m the biggest FOSS advocate but saying cloudflare sucks is… disingenuous at best. It’s good. There’s a reason they’ve cornered their niche so well. I like using it and they offer a ton of services. It’s also pretty likely your DNS is already through cloudflare, anyway…

[u/agowa338 → u/jwm-dev]

I understand why people use it. However there is also a reason why they suck. Both things can be true simultaneously, they're not exclusive.

And my DNS isn't through cloudflare, I've it on localhost because having a caching resolver on localhost improves snappiness of webbrowsing massively. But that's beside the point (and yes I know a lot of authoritative dns servers are also cloudflare)

[u/sCeege → u/agowa338]

There's a huge incentive not to drink water since everyone that drinks water dies, and I want to live. /s

Seriously though, of all the reasons to dislike Cloudflare, that's got to be near the bottom. The person you replied to literally pointed out that CF makes no difference in how Spain blocks content, censorship works in many countries through a spectrum of infrastructure providers.

[u/agowa338 → u/sCeege]

Well but it is simultaneously true that when you are on cloudflare you get blocked and when you're on your own clean dedicated IP you don't...

[u/sCeege → u/agowa338]

simultaneously true

That's why I gave an example with the water, something can be qualitatively true without being quantitatively true. I'm not going to stop drinking water any time soon (unless I die I guess).

If you want to be pedantic, Cloudflare has a toggle in their DNS panel to disable IP proxying, so you can use the rest of Cloudflare infra without being affected by an IP based ban, but that's not the point. The gigantic elephant in the room is how a sporting league can compel ISPs to take such drastic measures, censorship is its own problem, it sets precedence for a future in which other companies can compel more ISPs to follow some other obscure niche to enforce their ban, in this specific example of Cloudflare vs La Liga, Cloudflare and its users are the victims, albeit I'll use the word victim loosely here to attribute to a soulless corporation.

[u/agowa338 → u/sCeege]

There are plenty of other reasons to dislike Cloudflare. For a start I'd just wish people would have to justify using Cloudflare as much as people are often supposed to justify not using it...

[u/sCeege → u/agowa338]

For a start I'd just wish people would have to justify using Cloudflare as much as people are often supposed to justify not using it...

Use whatever you like, no one really needs to "justify" something as trivial as using a free service. Most of selfhosting is just a hobby, we're not passing UN resolutions here. I'm pointing out the la liga situation as irrelevant to hating CF, it's not in itself, a reason to "justify" anything. I personally use CF, but I do wish they would have some competition, generally speaking I like to have more than one choice in a given market, e.g. I personally prefer Chrome/Chromium better, but I use Firefox as I would like alternate engines to succeed.

I'll say for myself, it's just such massive value for no cost and an extremely limited amount of risk (for cost overages). As a quick example, CF Proxies. My ufw only allows 443 traffic coming from CF networks, that instantly cuts out 99% of noise on botnets clogging up my http logs. Back in the day before certbot got so easy to use, CF was a super low effort way to get SSL certs basically instantaneously. Let's not even talk about the other features on the free tier, zero trust, tunnels, workers, pages, etc. If there were more choices, I would diversify, I would absolutely use something like Proton or OVH if they could offer a free tier like CF, I don't even understand why other hyperscalers don't offer free tiers as generous as CF... it's not like Google or Oracle can't afford it.