So, Cloudflare is just a flakey MITM? \ stacker news ~builders

pull down to refresh

898 sats \ 16 comments \ @itsrealfake 6h builders

I woke up early this morning, feeling motivated.

I wanted to research why my LN channel (through Alby, to one of their default providers) was closed.

I tried to follow a link to http://Amboss.space, alas... cloudflare was down.

"Dang, this is unreliable, I've gotta setup a node for myself!" I thought to myself.

So, I did what any self-respecting pseudo-sysadmin would do, and went to somebody else's computers to see what they could do for me!

In attempting to access DigitalOcean, I discovered that I couldn't log in, because Cloudflare was down.

Well, then I did what any self-respecting pseudo-sysadmin would do, and I went to the place where I keep my personal content hosted on somebody else's servers... NearlyFreeSpeech. I wanted to find out the cost of block storage, because at Digital Ocean, I knew it would be about $0.10/GB/month... which (while the blockchain is about 700gb) would cost me about $70/month... just for the privilege to have a node on somebody else's server... thanks spammers.

While I was perusing NFS, I came across their recent blog post: https://blog.nearlyfreespeech.net/2025/07/27/a-quick-note-to-our-queer-members

While I'm not "queer" by (what I imagine is) the standard definition, I do appreciate that NFS has a policy against getting bullied by a certain subset of politically motivated aggressors (note that they're happy to bully the right-wing, but if you're leftwing then you're a good guy)

So I read their blog post, and came across this quote:

the Fair Access to Banking Act (FABA) is currently in the US Senate and would prohibit banks and payment processors from putting this type of pressure on businesses engaged in legal activity. It was introduced and co-sponsored by 43 Republican Senators big mad about alleged bias against conservative businesses. If you’re in the US, please encourage your elected representatives to support it, if not because it would really help this sort of thing then because irony is an important part of a good, nutritious breakfast.

Oh, right... the irony.

I didn't have FABA in my cache, and I was somewhat pleased to know there was a thing that seemed like the US government might be up to something I find (at least on the surface) to be a desirable sort of thing. So, I figured I would do a little research, and used http://duck.com to find my resource, a .gov site seemed to be the best place to go have a look at the bill, after I had read the AI synopsis of the act:

Anyway, Cloudflare wouldn't have it my way, as they decided to do some sort of global maintenance which broke the internet.

So, my friends out there in stacker(news)land, I have some questions for you.

Why do we use this fucking shit!? What sort of fucked up world are we in where it makes sense to centralize the decentralized internet onto a flakey CDN? Has the internet bubble gone the same way as the AI bubble will go? (First, a boom, then a bust, then a universalized experience of crummy, low-availability corporate sites which only serve to corral our digital experience?)

Shame on the internet for making such a fucking mockery of the cyberpunk future I was sold.

edit to add: do you host a bitcoin node on somebody else's server? where do you find cheap block storage? thanks (in advance) for your attention to this matter.

view all related items

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @optimism 5h

What sort of fucked up world are we in where it makes sense to centralize the decentralized internet onto a flakey CDN?

Umm... it never made sense! But if you don't then your CISA will tell you that "you do not have a good DDoS protection" so you have to centralize everything behind the same gatekeeper like everyone does because SPOF is secure yo.

Shame on the internet for making such a fucking mockery of the cyberpunk future I was sold.

Why? The only thing that doesn't work well for me right now is when I want to fact-check a local LLM. Everything else I've been doing today is working.

100 sats \ 3 replies \ @itsrealfake OP 5h

Why? The only thing that doesn't work well for me right now is when I want to fact-check a local LLM. Everything else I've been doing today is working.

okay, well... I mentioned several sites that weren't working, so do with that what you will.

since my post, I've discovered that my fiat credit union doesn't work, primal.net doesn't work, and x.com (which I haven't logged into for months, and I only learned about the outage via NOSTR) isn't working.

so... that's why.

121 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 5h

Understand. What I wonder is: how are your fiat credit union, primal.net or x.com part of the cyberpunk future?

100 sats \ 1 reply \ @itsrealfake OP 5h

ah, point taken.

I suppose those are part of the cyberfunk future

100 sats \ 0 replies \ @optimism 4h

The fun has ended, it's up again. Back to work.

69 sats \ 2 replies \ @anon 6h

Simple solution: Host your own full bitcoin node(s) and lightning node(s). It costs a few hundred USD up front with minimal monthly maintenance fees. What's needed is an investment of time which can be leveraged using education.

Once you have your own node you too can engage in punitive forms of censorship by disconnecting peers and closing channels with nodes that you don't like. For example, nodes that use kitsch colors (#ff00eb ewww) or include non-ASCII characters in their alias ;D

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @itsrealfake OP 6h

aww, cute.

yes... I see your point, and you're correct. I've got a handful of nodes which I sometimes plug in to get latest blocks and then unplug before I nomad around the continent.

I suppose I could keep the nodes running on battery & starlink while driving, but jeez that's an education curve that I've not yet surmounted.

I appreciate your comment though, as it's helping to reenforce the obviousness of your message to me: that I should use the empty 1TB drive in my desk's drawer as the volume storage I'm looking for... it'll be easier with an LLM to support my efforts to mount that badboy by default on reboot, which was the challenge that prevented my success a couple years ago.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @anon 5h

You could have multiple nodes running in different locations and connect to them remotely while you're travelling. But yeah, it's irritating if bitcoin core or lightning crashes while you're away and you can't physically access it to troubleshoot.

I'm not sure how best to deal with this securely. Also not sure how vulnerable self-hosted nodes are to DDOS attacks. Is this why people prefer to host their nodes on a server?

When i close my eyes i still see #FF00EB ;D

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby 6h

What sort of fucked up world are we in where it makes sense to centralize the decentralized internet onto a flakey CDN? Has the internet bubble gone the same way as the AI bubble will go?

Do you think Bitcoin is destined for a different outcome?

My hope is that maybe the fact that economic incentives are rolled into it will help, but there is no question that there are centralizing pressures on mining, and same for self-custody, which is to say on merchants who will accept the coin.

But not feeling optimistic here.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake OP 6h

Do you think Bitcoin is destined for a different outcome?

I make it a point to hold multiple opinions of the future in my head, so... yes and no. On the one hand, yeah there are some incentives. On the other hand, as they say, the white paper is as good as the paper it's printed on.

If we get swarmed by NGU-only, or NFT-only, or MerchantAdoption-only brains, then I suspect the bitty is destined for the historical bin of squandered opportunity.

And then but so, what needs to happen for the bitty to thrive? Perhaps, a multitude of voices need to adopt it. Right now, the more densely connected (informationally) community of users is concerned with blockspace and what appears to be a well thought-out op.

e.g. WHY THE FUCK IS BITCOIN'S CENTRAL DEVELOPER HUB HOSTED ON GITHUB??

this seems like a major issue. and until we get something like NostrGit I think we're going to have centralization problems due to way that the tools we're using are using us.

So, yah... I think the centrality of the development efforts is a major issue for bitcoin.

Lkewise, we can consider capable software engineers as a priest class for modern techno-times. and what can we do about that? well, I guess that gets at why I posted in ~builders... because we need more of the builder types... more priests who can spread the gospel. And, behold, in my vision, it's supposed to be the good-minded priests who prevail... those informed by the great living philosopher priest, his sudo-holiness Richard Stallman.

e.g. WE NEED MORE EYES ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CATHEDRAL

For my part, I'm some variant of one-foot-in-one-foot-out of the FOSS future that I envision. I'm capable or reading and writing in code, and was using Linux before I learned to code, but my brain's grasp of the fundamentals is still growing... and somehow I fell off the desktop linux boat a couple of years ago when I bought an M2 Mac for local LLM reasons.

it's admittedly getting better on my end.

and for the rest of you, I can recommend Chaincode's BOSS program. I learned SO SO much about how the system I care so much about is working through that program. (ps. hire me for projects or teams! (I've got 10+ years of software engineering experience at big and small companies and run my own consultancy now)).

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @kilianbuhn 4h

Why do we use this fucking shit!? What sort of fucked up world are we in where it makes sense to centralize the decentralized internet onto a flakey CDN?

The problem isn't using CDN per se. The problem is there are no fallbacks for when CDNs go down.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake OP 3h

the problem is the centralized CDN

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake OP 6h

lol at messages like this:

oh, the futility of it all.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @itsrealfake OP 6h