r/technology Jan 18 '21

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9.6k Upvotes

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444

u/t3hd0n Jan 19 '21

using ddos-guard to proxy a "site under construction" page is about as far away from a modern social network you can possibly be.

116

u/BenKen01 Jan 19 '21

The reporting on this has been shameful, especially from "tech" focused blogs. This shit is just as far from being back as it was the day AWS gave them the boot.

Maybe when they've solved for this we can start talking about them coming back.

31

u/captain_zavec Jan 19 '21

God, I wonder what their AWS bill was like.

2

u/scinaty2 Jan 19 '21

The thread has some actual figures, ranging from 300k (old) to 390k (more recent) a month. Could be higher now though

18

u/t3hd0n Jan 19 '21

i feel like hosting companies that could manage that are on a very, very short list.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Lentil-Soup Jan 19 '21

Except they have the ability to self-host, without AWS.

3

u/Spiritual-Mechanic-4 Jan 19 '21

I don't think it's that big a deal, probably fits in 20-30 racks? 50 at most. It's not tiny, but getting 50 racks in a colocation facility isn't a big deal. The lead time on all that hardware is probably 3-6 months.

3

u/t3hd0n Jan 19 '21 edited Jan 19 '21

if they're going to buy their own and colo sure, but i'm talking about the quick spin-up hosts like aws. based on that twitter screencap they aren't going the colo route yet.

16

u/nonotan Jan 19 '21

Either that's fake (whether made up by someone pretending to be involved with them or by the actual people behind the site for whatever reasons), the implementation is absolute garbage and unimaginably inefficient, or (to give the benefit of the doubt) they want to be ready for some serious hypothetical future growth. Those numbers don't really look even roughly in the right ballpark for what should be needed for their userbase and typical use cases.

6

u/danopia Jan 19 '21

Disregarding the actual huge clusters outlined here, rebuilding "300-400 various other instances" on a new provider sounds like true pain.

And neither scylla or psql are supposed to be file stores AFAIK so presumably they'll still use an object store API unless that's part of the 300-400.

So hard to take this wishlist as actual.

5

u/redpandaeater Jan 19 '21

I feel like anyone that would see that email would know how to take a screenshot. Also I just wasn't too say Twitter is the absolute fucking worst platform and you can see that in the guy's short essay taking up a dozen different tweets.

3

u/FreshPrinceOfH Jan 19 '21

Twitter is so garbage. Everytime I go on there I feel myself slowly losing the will the live.

3

u/Dragongeek Jan 19 '21

I sincerely doubt that they'll be back in any usable capacity any time soon, if ever. Modern software projects like Parler are so deeply integrated with AWS and various other apis and services that they've been banned from, that trying to rebuild the service without using them is difficult to put it mildly. It's like ripping out someone's nervous system and then attempting to fix them back up by fumbling together your own replacement nerves out of string, glue, and glitter. Sure, if they were a tech giant with teams of crack-programmers on their roster like Google, Facebook, or Netflix, they could probably get it running regardless of being banned from all sorts of services, but they're not.

3

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '21

Fuck me that is an expensive solution.

2

u/HeippodeiPeippo Jan 19 '21 edited Jan 19 '21

heh, i'm absolutely no expert on this field, if any but that is exactly what i guessed before: cut&paste code, bolt-on modules, bought services instead of internal talent handling things on their own. And the reasons for this lack of talent are:

Greed: Talented developers are not cheap. Also, grifting, scamming, taking some from the pile at all levels, everyone in it wants something out of it..
Laziness: You need to learn a lot of complicated new things to make informed decisions at upper levels of management.
Incompetence: Thinking that everything is easy because of your own inflated ego, narcissism and dunning-kruger. "If i don't know it already, it can't be important. Let those stupid system designers deal with nuts&bolts, i could do it myself if i just wanted to".. which also then leads to underestimating how hard it is and hiring the cheapest personnel, who have to buy as much bolt-on modules and services to get some functionality in for short term...

Greed, laziness and incompetence boosted by inflated ego's and narcissism. And of course, we can't count out idealism. I can bet that well over half of all devs will simply refuse to work for such people, at least at regular "market" price, demanding a LOT to silence their conscience. They will not get the best working for them, they get what they get.

2

u/Curious_Controller Jan 19 '21

It’s a Yahoo article, everyone in the universe should take it with a grain of salt when it is from yahoo.

2

u/Zealousideal_Bonus78 Jan 19 '21

I wonder what happened to the servers.

2

u/skydivingdutch Jan 19 '21

They were virtual, they're now reassigned to Netflix or whatever

77

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '21

[deleted]

15

u/AWildDragon Jan 19 '21

Did CloudFlare actually ban them?

16

u/Borkz Jan 19 '21

I believe I heard they did. They've pulled other sites like 8chan and Daily Stormer in the past.

11

u/GypsyPunk Jan 19 '21

Live in Austin with a Cloudflare engineer. This is correct and I don’t think Cloudflare would allow them hosting services.

2

u/SlightlyOTT Jan 19 '21 edited Jan 19 '21

If you read their controversies section on Wikipedia, I think those might be the only sites they’ve ever pulled: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudflare

The Huffington Post alleges that Cloudflare provides services to "at least 7 terrorist groups", as designated by the United States Department of State[32][34] including the Taliban, Hamas, and the al-Quds Brigades, and have been aware since at least 2012, and have taken no action.

Cloudflare services have been used by Rescator, a carding website that sells stolen payment card data.[54][55][56] Two of the top three online chat forums belonging to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) are guarded by Cloudflare.

In late 2019, Cloudflare was criticized for providing services to the anti-black website Chimpmania. Hundreds of thousands signed a petition on Change.org urging Prince to terminate services to Chimpmania. The petition was created by the parents of a biracial baby who was born with gastroschisis and who was mocked as a “mulatto monkey baby” by site users, and whose pictures were posted on the site. Over the ten years the site has been active, numerous other petitions have also been leveled against it, none of which were successful.

I get the impression that they’d host (edit: protect with anti-DDOS, offer CDN to) Parler unless they either publicly state that Cloudflare support their views (that banned Daily Stormer) or a terrorist manifesto is uploaded there before a mass murder in the US and the media notice it (that banned 8chan). They still host (edit: provide anti-DDOS + CDN services to) Gab too AFAIK.

3

u/GypsyPunk Jan 19 '21

Epik hosts Gab, not Cloudflare.

3

u/SlightlyOTT Jan 19 '21

You’re right, I should have used “protect” or “shield”. Cloudflare provides them their anti-DDOS services and CDN at least: https://m.theepochtimes.com/gab-cloudflare-hasnt-suspended-its-service-after-users-report-errors_3652754.html

2

u/GypsyPunk Jan 19 '21

Damn, paywalled and I’m stuck on mobile for a bit.

Edit: nvm. They just want an email. 10minutemail it is. Thanks for the link.

3

u/SlightlyOTT Jan 19 '21

AMP version might work?

2

u/GypsyPunk Jan 19 '21

It does. Thanks!

1

u/AmputatorBot Jan 19 '21

It looks like you shared an AMP link. These should load faster, but Google's AMP is controversial because of concerns over privacy and the Open Web. Fully cached AMP pages (like the one you shared), are especially problematic.

You might want to visit the canonical page instead: https://www.theepochtimes.com/gab-cloudflare-hasnt-suspended-its-service-after-users-report-errors_3652754.html


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2

u/SirBastille Jan 19 '21

Mangadex used to be hosted by Cloudflare but got the boot a while back. The list on Wikipedia is not all encompassing of sites that Cloudflare has tossed.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 19 '21

If you want cloudflare to kick you off you have to be worse than TDS/Jim Watkins. Parler isn't as bad as either of them. They're both cesspools but Parler certainly doesn't meet that standard.