this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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.