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Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users

(openrss.org)
556 points campuscodi | 2 comments | 16 Oct 24 22:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.008s | source
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amatecha ◴[17 Oct 24 06:43 UTC] No.41867018[source]▶
I get blocked from websites with some regularity, running Firefox with strict privacy settings, "resist fingerprinting" etc. on OpenBSD. They just give a 403 Forbidden with no explanation, but it's only ever on sites fronted by CloudFlare. Good times. Seems legit.
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DrillShopper ◴[17 Oct 24 16:20 UTC] No.41871086[source]▶
Maybe after the courts break up Amazon the FTC can turn its eye to Cloudflare.
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gjsman-1000 ◴[17 Oct 24 16:23 UTC] No.41871107[source]▶
A. Do you think courts give a darn about the 0.1% of users that are still using RSS? We might as well care about the 0.1% of users who want the ability to set every website's background color to purple with neon green anchor tags. RSS never caught on as a standard to begin with, peaking at 6% adoption by 2005.

B. Cloudflare has healthy competition with AWS, Akamai, Fastly, Bunny.net, Mux, Google Cloud, Azure, you name it, there's a competitor. This isn't even an Apple vs Google situation.

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1. HappMacDonald ◴[17 Oct 24 22:19 UTC] No.41874383[source]▶
Cloudflare doesn't offer the same product suite as the other companies you mention, though. Cloudflare is primarily DDoS prevention while the others are primarily cloud hosting.

And it is the DDoS prevention measures at issue here.

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2. gjsman-1000 ◴[18 Oct 24 00:04 UTC] No.41875086[source]▶
Five years ago, you would’ve been right, but Cloudflare is very different now.

Nowadays, Cloudflare has image compression and CDN services, video storage and delivery services, serverless compute with Workers, domain registration, (soon) container support with optional GPUs, durable objects (basically serverless storage), serverless SQL databases (D1), even an AWS S3 competitor with B2. They even have bespoke services like CloudFlare Tunnels - what’s AWS got that’s anything like it?

Cloudflare is getting close to full-on AWS. At least, the parts most customers use. If they just added boring old VPSs, people would realize very quickly how full featured they are.

As for DDoS mitigation - you’ve still got AWS Shield, Akamai, Azure, Radware, F5, even Oracle (Dyn) competing in that market. Unless you could show Cloudflare did illegal tying as a monopolist specifically to sell DDoS prevention, there’s no case.