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@frogzone @p @jae

last i checked the internet had ISP and independent servers

Backbone ISPs just provide transit and "domestic"/"business" ISPs offer you that transit as a service along with DNS and whatnot. They are irrelevant to the discussion of CDNs. They are not prepared to provide you with CDNs or DDoS protection, nor is their infra.

Independent servers are another thing. Those can do both, but try convincing somebody that is truly independent to provide those services. Today's Internet is mostly no longer "independent" in almost any definition. Most of the backbone is handled by two or three companies that can anytime decide to just nullroute your ASN, if you own one, or drop your BGP announce and you are stuck talking to basically nobody. The network itself is no longer a few cables mostly used for universities.

if fedi wasn't so packed with big tech stockholm syndrome and sycophancy we would have worked out that CDNs are a bad idea

CDNs are currently the only way to divert unnecessary traffic from main servers that works. If you need some network resiliency and transfer speeds that are acceptable to your clients around the world, you just need them.

This server is hosted in NY, USA and across the pond I can at most pull 8MB/s of bandwidth. Now let's say that I have 30 users that are in Europe just sitting at their computer looking through the timelines. That is probably enough to completely saturate that available bandwidth. I've also recently switched ISPs and I magically gained ~7MB/s (previously max bandwidth was around 1.5MB/s), probably because this ISP is peered somewhere else and has a better connection.

In this case at least a cache server somewhere in Europe would be needed to off-load the media proxy traffic from the main server in NY. This is the ideal use case for CDNs.

(#)DCN (Decentralised Content Nodes) are needed.

First of all, that sounds like something from the crypto world, so I'm instantly 50% more like to think it's some non-sensical thing. Second of all, what even is this and who then owns the "content" on the nodes. As a company, I could understand that some of my cacheable data lives on some random CF server, but it might be unacceptable to store that on someone else's server. With CF/Akamai/... you are trusting one company, with your own CDN you trust only yourself and with a DCN, you are trusting every node? Privacy laws, especially EU ones, might make this a new technology that is completely DoA.

Also it seems that IPFS could be used for that already, so why even bother making something new.

But enough said, the post I replied to wasn't even about CDNs.

Also I can completely understand that anyone hates CF for making everyone click on the boats, when they go to visit random website.

Same thing with their WAF and other CF control panel settings that like to completely mess with traffic.

I also can understand if someone hates them, if they are used as a gateway/tunnel to the real server (CF IP in DNS->filtering, WAF, boats,... -> real server).

Or just their scummy behavior.

I hate them for all of the above. But I cannot understand when somebody doesn't like them for the technology they've built, because they don't share it with everyone.

Thank you for reading my blog post and I'm sorry for my Pete long post syndrome.