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In other words, CDN isn't a platform, it's a service. Consume services, but own your platform. Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like. YouTube or Apple absolutely will.

> Cloudflare's not going to shut your web presence down because you're "competing" with them or just plain doing something they don't like.

While I agree with this distinction, I'm not entirely sure that this is wholly accurate.

The situations in which Cloudflare might have to intervene with legal content are probably pretty limited (e.g. content that would be legal, yet very controversial, or expose something about the company or something like that), but it's still possible.

As a thought experiment, consider a situation in which a person might be using a Russian CDN and would be hosting content about Ukrainian refugees (no intentions of getting political here, it's just a good example) - now I'm pretty sure that Russia might just make it illegal, but even without it being explicitly legal, a few strings could be pulled and the service to that site shut down. What about a Chinese CDN that expresses views that are different than the ruling government would approve of.

Maybe there should be an asterisk there - depending on the nature of your content, have both the services you use and the platform that you own be somewhere, where it won't cause problems.

But you can always change CDN provider in a few minutes, an hour or a day.

You cannot move from Twitter to SomeOtherUnknownPlatform.com or from the App Store to UnknownAppStore.com if those platforms decide they don't want you there. Well you can, but no one will ever see you again. You cannot even move to a well known platform in case your followers are not there (or don't use that OS). At least, it will take years to move them over.

> But you can always change CDN provider in a few minutes, an hour or a day.

It depends entirely on how many of their offerings you choose to use: https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudflare-product-portfolio/

That's like saying that your application that is running in AWS can easily be moved elsewhere, but that's going to be true only sometimes: a lot of the time you'll use their managed services (which may or may not be compatible with others), their SDKs for setting up the infrastructure (which may or may not be trivial to migrate) and might end up with a lot of knowledge that's largely only valid within their ecosystem.

But that's mostly because a lot of the larger service providers out there try to expand their market reach and provide lots of different services: like I could go to my domain registrar and get either managed hosting or VPSes.

> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs

Personally, although i'm not dogmatic about it, i'm rather opposed to CDNs for two reasons:

1) For performance reasons: unless you're distributing video, removing bloat from your webpage makes it faster to load from anywhere (including bad connection on the other side of the world) than to add a CDN on top ; i've already got a TCP route to your server so if you stay under 1MB that's much faster than to resolve a new domain and open a new route

2) For security reasons: CDNs are often used to distribute scripts, which are the #1 entrypoint for infecting users with malware. Also, as you pointed out, "anti-DDOS" reverse-proxies like CloudFlare are yet another case and should not be used in 99.99% of cases, because TLS will be terminated on their side and they can read all your users passwords!

I believe the web would be a much better place if content was served from a single origin (i believe it was not done originally because most of us didn't have enough bandwidth to consider the option). For shared content across origins, there's much better solutions than CDNs in the form of Content-Addressed Storage (eg. Bittorrent/IPFS/DAT). Whether you download it from a single trusted source (eg. your ISP), or in a p2p fashion is your choice... but a location-addressed protocol like HTTP is not well-suited for distributing static content across the world.

If only browser vendors (read: Google) were not too busy destroying our URL bars or inventing new tracking systems for advertisements that would be a fixed problem by now. But no, who needs reliable content distribution for smaller websites when you can have WebGL and a Battery API to better track users and make it harder for competitors to implement browsers?! I guess it also doesn't help that Google who develops for ~90% market share is the biggest 3rd party origin today with Google Fonts, Google Analytics, Firebase, etc.

Cloudflare serve something like 12% of the entire web don't they? That's more than enough to be worrying even if they theoretically have some competition.

> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs

For sure, I was just using it as an example on how subjective "owning your platform" can be.

I actually have zero problems with Cloudflare, CDNs, etc. If I did have a problem with it and you disagreed, wouldn't that still illustrate my point that "ownership" is subjective and opinionated?

> how subjective "owning your platform" can be

I think your point is a good one, but I don't entirely agree. I think the comment you were replying to suggests an objective criterion:

> CDN is pretty interchangeable and easy to switch between

So I think there is a real basis by which you can objectively decide how much of your platform you need to own. Outsource commodity components (Linux servers, CDN and static hosting, managed database as a service maybe?) but don't get locked into proprietary components (hypothetical e.g.: writing all your blog posts in the Medium editor, where you can't access the source if they remove the "export as markdown" button).

Of course there are nuances, and we can argue over exactly how commodified a particular capability is, but I don't think that makes it subjective. Maybe each person prefers different tradeoffs on a subjective basis, but can probably regard the facts objectively (e.g. count the number of managed database providers, decide it's acceptably commodified, but still run your own database server anyway because it's interesting).

That's a really good point. I could definitely see interchangeable tooling being a good criteria for owning your platform. I feel like I've never described it that way before but that is totally how I determine what is going to be a part of my tech stack. I.E. "Is it possible to self host this tooling/workflow?", "Are there competitors?" are some of the questions I ask myself before adopting a tool or workflow. Being able to self host my critical applications is a big deal even if I don't choose to self host all of them.

Again, very good point and I feel like I can totally get on board with this definition of ownership.

> I don't really understand why the decentralized internet folks harp on CDNs

+1,000,000 here. CDNs are exactly a mechanism for distributing content around the world in order to serve users locally. It's exactly decentralization! And, as you point out, the industry harbors healthy competition.

Distributed physically but not from an ownership standpoint.