Honestly, I don’t know how any end user who doesn’t understand IT and wasn’t around before services like Cloudflare were available can say this. They objectively don’t have the information or experience to make the claim.
I’ve been using the intermet since 2003 and have seen no difference except when cloudfare breaks.
Yes, the internet is much bigger than it was in 2003, and it needs more complex protective tools. The fact that you haven’t noticed cloudflare when it is working is a sign that it is, well, working.
And the fact that your favorite sites aren’t down more often is yet another sign. Downtime due to DDOS attacks alone would be so much greater without cloudflare than downtime due to cloudflare currently is. Your perspective is a pure lack of knowledge and an excess of confirmation bias.
Have you ever self hosted a website? Was that a modern website, or just a bunch of text? Are you experienced with uptime SLAs on multiple services? Have you ever had to deal with a DDOS attack?
There are lots of things that Cloudflare does that requires experience and knowledge to notice or understand. And it isn’t even the biggest single point of failure when it comes to the Internet. When AWS has an outage for instance there is a huge chunk of the Internet that goes down.
There are problems with the centralization of the Internet. But this happened for a reason, and it has been so long and these services have been so reliable that people don’t even realize what it was like before.
I can answer that for you! No. They have never self hosted a website. In fact, I doubt they have ever connected to a website via any protocol beyond http/https. I’d bet a paycheck on it.
I’ve been using the intermet since 2003
Then you should remember this: https://youtu.be/48rz8udZBmQ?si=81BQVmYGYRhpPCsw
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtu.be/48rz8udZBmQ?si=81BQVmYGYRhpPCsw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
