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Cloudflare drops sites from their service on a daily basis for having content they dislike. They remove sites with adult content, support for sex workers, etc. They also drop sites they deem to be posting spam. Cloudflare's censored 1.1.1.3 DNS blocks lots of LGBT content, etc.

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I assume 1.1.1.3 also blocks KF

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Also switter seems to have been blocked from hosting, not from DDoS protection? I'm not very sin be this seems to be the case

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Cloudflare banned Switter from using their DDoS protection which is provided as part of their caching reverse proxy. Cloudflare's main service is the reverse proxy. They weren't hosting Switter, they were proxying to it, which they say doesn't count as hosting the content.

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Do you have a link? Vice seems to say they hosted it

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Cloudflare has been saying that their caching reverse proxy doesn't count as hosting sites but the overall consensus is that it counts as them being part of hosting the site. It's in their interest to portray it as not being hosting to reduce the responsibility people expect.

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I think proxying isn't hosting but the always online caching thing is

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Their proxy is inherently caching based on Cache-Control / Expires headers. It tries to cache everything it can cache and then serves it from cache until it's supposed to revalidate. At that point it does conditional fetch that only actually fetches the content if it has changed.

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Always online is an optional feature for when the origin server goes down to continue serving stale content from the cache even though the expiry time has passed. Whether or not you use that, the caching is how their CDN works and is also essentially part of DDoS mitigation.

12:02 PM · Sep 1, 2022Twitter Web App

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Their caching reduces load from legitimate requests on the origin server(s) and reduces latency for users since content is largely served from nearby Cloudflare edge nodes. DDoS protection just comes with using their caching reverse proxy. It's an inherent mandatory part of it.

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I think it doesn't count as hosting responsibility-wise without the Always Online thing, even if it actually is hosting technically. Legally is probably a different story too though

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Cloudflare being used that way stops people from figuring out the origin server hosting company which is part of the purpose of it. That means the only people you can ask to take down the content are Cloudflare and they just forward your requests with your identity to the site.

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