483
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
483 points (98.6% liked)
Fediverse
28566 readers
498 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Cloudflared services like ani.social are getting a “100%” available stat. That site may be up but it’s unavailable (denying availability) to something like ~1-3% of the population 100% of the time. So in principle it should never be able to achieve the 100% availability stat.
I understand it would be quite difficult to calculate an availability figure that accounts for access restrictions to marginalized groups, because apart from Cloudflare you would not have a practical way of knowing how firewalls are configured. But one thing you could (and should) do is mark the known walled gardens in some way. E.g. put a “🌩” next to Cloudflare sites and warn people that they are not open access sites.
The lestat.org availability listing is like a competition that actually gives a perception advantage to services that exclude people, thus rewarding them for compromising availability. I would also subtract off ~2% for all CF sites as a general rule simply because you know it’s not 100% available to everyone. They do not deserve that 100% trophy, nor is it accurate.
Hey, thanks for your feedback. I like your idea of labeling Cloudflared services, reporting is indeed a bit tricky for those especially if they use "Always online" to serve cached copies while the instance is down. I have some ideas on how to combat that, but labeling them also makes sense.
I can add tags against services - I have done this for ani.social as a proof of concept, I think it works but I welcome feedback. Sorting through the entire list is a bit daunting and will take me a while, but I'll get there.
Manually adjusting availability is a can of worms that I don't want to open, I'd rather we try to find other ways to level the playing field.
I think this project has some tools that might automate that:
https://0xacab.org/dCF/deCloudflare
They ID and track every website that joins #Cloudflare. It’s a huge effort but those guys are on top of it. A script could check the list of domains against their list. There is also this service (from the same devs) which does some checks:
https://karma.crimeflare.eu.org:1984/api/is/cloudflare/html/
but caveat: if a non-CF domain (e.g. example.tld) has a CF host (e.g. somehost.example.tld), that tool will return YES for the whole domain.
I would suggest not bothering with any complex math, and simply do the calculation as you normally do but then if a site is Cloudflare cap whatever the calculated figure is to 98%. Probably most (if not all) CF sites would be 100% anyway, so they would just be reduced by 2%. Though it would need to be explained somewhere -- the beauty of which would be to help inform people that the CF walled garden is excluding people. Cloudflare’s harm perpetuates to a large extent because people are unaware that it’s an exclusive walled garden that marginalizes people.
That project is a great find, thanks! A real time saver, I should have these marked up shortly.
I'll do some more thinking on how we represent Cloudflare instances in general, I think for the time being I may just include a short note for them as people will wonder why they're marked anyway.
Edit: This is now done, all Cloudflare instances marked and an explanation added.
Glad to see they are tagged. It could evolve more but the tags are the most important thing.