We seriously need to differentiate servers, otherwise the decentralization is useless.
Someone in another post showed a decent site that shows cloudflare dependency, so I threw the top 35 actives from observer into it. It’s honestly not as bad as I expected it would be, but it is concerning.
Lemmy
lemmy.world(Active Users: 14512): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
sh.itjust.works(Active Users: 2509): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
lemmy.ml(Active Users: 2087): Cloudflare? No
lemmy.zip(Active Users: 1704): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
lemmy.dbzer0.com(Active Users: 1444): Cloudflare? No
lemmy.ca(Active Users: 1381): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
lemmygrad.ml(Active Users: 972): Cloudflare? No
lemmy.blahaj.zone(Active Users: 956): Cloudflare? No
programming.dev(Active Users: 929): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
discuss.tchncs.de(Active Users: 778): Cloudflare? No
sopuli.xyz(Active Users: 596): Cloudflare? No
slrpnk.net(Active Users: 371): Cloudflare? No
infosec.pub(Active Users: 331): Cloudflare? No
lemmy.today(Active Users: 314): Cloudflare? No
midwest.social(Active Users: 307): Cloudflare? No
reddthat.com(Active Users: 292): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
feddit.nl(Active Users: 290): Cloudflare? No
pawb.social(Active Users: 243): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
forum.guncadindex.com(Active Users: 234): Cloudflare? No
mander.xyz(Active Users: 194): Cloudflare? No
lemmings.world(Active Users: 177): Cloudflare? No
ani.social(Active Users: 173): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
feddit.it(Active Users: 158): Cloudflare? No
startrek.website(Active Users: 156): Cloudflare? No
feddit.dk(Active Users: 151): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,cname)
leminal.space(Active Users: 126): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
ttrpg.network(Active Users: 125): Cloudflare? No
szmer.info(Active Users: 116): Cloudflare? No
lemmy.eco.br(Active Users: 99): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,proxy,cname)
lemy.lol(Active Users: 97): Cloudflare? Yes(dns,cname)
awful.systems(Active Users: 90): Cloudflare? No
I think you missed the second biggest instance (at least it was a while back.)
lemmynsfw.com is using Cloudflare DNS, CDN/Proxy
Edit:
Also noticed:
checkforcloudflare.selesti.com is using Cloudflare DNS, CDN/Proxy.I used observer and sorted by active users, so maybe fediverse observer doesn’t host the instance due to the NSFW? idk
Not the goonercave too, Say it ain’t so.
It looks like that source also didn’t list hexbear.net, which seems to be around the 5th or 6th largest Lemmy instance, at 1.57k monthly active users. Results from the site you linked (thanks, by the way) say that they use Cloudflare for DNS but not for CDN/Proxy/SSL.
Hexbear and lemmynsfw aren’t listed on fedidb either, which leads me to believe that they must block whatever discovery mechanism is being used by these fedi stats sites.
Yea that would make sense, if that endpoint is blocked then it wouldn’t be added.
dbzer0 was not affected and even had a post about it.
I just moved my instance off of cloudflare, you’re all welcome to make an account here!
This other post has some discussion: https://lemmy.ca/post/55386786
While the downtime was most active, most of the top instances were down. Lemmy.ml, feddit.org, discuss.tchncs.de and behaw.org were all up. You can use https://lemmyverse.net/ to browse things and the ones offline all show a “content error” in lemmyverse.
Here is a screenshot that @straycatstrut@discuss.tchncs.de took during the outage

I just came home and learned about the outage. Still can’t get the smirk of superiority out of my face from when I noticed my people were still able to shitpost in my absence.
I appreciate that different teams are doing different things, I’ll have to remember to drop by during the next cloudflare outage 😄
mine was
sopuli.xyz was fine.
- piefed.social - down
- lemmy.world - down
- slrpnk.net - up
- mastodon.social - up
sh.itjust.works was down during it as well.
You can monitor instance downtime at:
feddit.dk was unaffected.
discuss.tchncs.de was fine.
Surprisingly, lemmy.sdf.org. was up… not that SDF would use cloud flare.
Mine was. And ran better than ever because it didn’t have to handle so many updates anymore. I missed the memes though, because the images weren’t loading.
mine was online, but it’s pretty buggy recently.














