I wrote this comment [0] very recently and when I wrote it had in mind that Cloudflare might very well end up being a key player in a more centralized Internet that has developed far away from its original architecture.

Defense against threats is a pretty strong centralization incentive in different kinds of networks - social, biological.

I could imagine that a lot of people are investing based on similar scenarios in their minds.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45946365

I havent looked into the financials but the reasons I really like cloudflare is that its workers are free without card for 100k and even after that its ridiculously cheap and cloudflare tunnels and a lot of features are free and really appreciate it

I feel like people like to rub that one time cloudflare messed up when I mention it but it was a gambling website and I feel like cloudflare could've better communicated it but overall its got so much less drama than the other cloud providers and its genuinely being really nice imo

But imo, cloudflare is really dirt cheap for just starting out and at scale as well especially if using cf workers

I feel like cloudflare can make a bank in enterprice section but their pricing model also feels the most saner compared to the shady tactics used by google or others with our marketing and privacy

I know that the internet is getting centralized but I feel like there are some ways of de-centralizing it, (by example archiving web pages and then seeding them, helping on internet archive or something similar as well)

As an internet user, cf feels mid but sometimes as a guy who just wants to deploy shit or basic apis, I "vibe coded" a cloudflare worker api which I actively use so much for my own purposes setting up a custom redirector and everything without paying anything at all, I think I like it.

Honestly, nothing is as good or as bad as it seems except palantir's evaluation which makes me feel like 448 pe ratio or something similar drove me nuts the other day.

Really?

Cloudflare isn't solely a CDN anymore. CDN and DDOS-protection were the most logical "first" products to build based on their SDN ( Software Defined Networking).

A cloud is the next thing and there's a lot of money involved with the cloud. I see them as the only real competitor/challenger to Azure, AWS, GCE, ... because they aren't bound to regions ( less DevOps)

For example, what you might not know about Durable Objects => https://boristane.com/blog/what-are-cloudflare-durable-objec...