78
Is the Fediverse truly decentralized? Not exactly.
(blog.benjojo.co.uk)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
While the hosting location may be decentralized, using Cloudflare introduces a level of centralization in the way Internet traffic is managed. Cloudflare acts as a central point through which all incoming traffic is routed before reaching your decentralized server. This centralization is evident in the fact that Cloudflare controls access to the site, providing security measures, CDN services and acting as a proxy server.
Without Cloudflare, hosting can indeed be decentralized, but the inclusion of this proxy service means that a central entity (Cloudflare) plays a key role in handling and directing traffic. This introduces a level of centralization to the overall service, even if the hosting itself remains decentralized.
And it will take me all of 60 seconds to turn off cloudflare on my instance I I ever have to and 5 min for TTL on the DNS to expire, bit in saying that I have moved from a small indipendent VPS to a much larger provider for cost saving (Mostly for storage, but also double the core count).