Is the Fediverse truly decentralized? Not exactly.
Is the Fediverse truly decentralized? Not exactly.
The author examined the distribution of instances in the fediverse. Given that many instances are hidden behind CDNs like Cloudflare or Fastly, the author employed ActivityPub's functionality to discover the actual hosting locations of servers. More than half (51%) of the fediverse is hosted within a single hosting company. The author suggests that the fediverse hosted mostly with a few major providers, deviates from its initial objectives.
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@[email protected] being behind Cloudflare does not stop an instance being decentralised at all. I have a very small site that I can only afford a little money to host it. Although it is "behind" Cloudflare, it is hosted in the UK. That hosting is decentralised. Without a CDN my instance could not exist unless I had a ton of cash to pay for superfast hosting.
None of this makes my site "centralised".
While the hosting location may be decentralized, using Cloudflare introduces a level of centralization in the way Internet traffic is managed. Cloudflare acts as a central point through which all incoming traffic is routed before reaching your decentralized server. This centralization is evident in the fact that Cloudflare controls access to the site, providing security measures, CDN services and acting as a proxy server.
Without Cloudflare, hosting can indeed be decentralized, but the inclusion of this proxy service means that a central entity (Cloudflare) plays a key role in handling and directing traffic. This introduces a level of centralization to the overall service, even if the hosting itself remains decentralized.
And it will take me all of 60 seconds to turn off cloudflare on my instance I I ever have to and 5 min for TTL on the DNS to expire, bit in saying that I have moved from a small indipendent VPS to a much larger provider for cost saving (Mostly for storage, but also double the core count).