Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)

[denise]

Beginning this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept), users may experience short periods of site slowdowns or difficulty accessing the site. If you do have access issues, they shouldn't last long for you in particular, but the length of time where access issues are possible should last for about a week or so. We wanted to warn you in advance. You may not notice anything, or the site may be down, slow, or unreachable for you for brief periods. The exact length of downtime, and the total potential downtime window, will depend on your internet provider's settings.

This downtime is necessary to move our domain nameservice, our content delivery network (CDN) services, and our denial-of-service protection services away from Cloudflare, our current provider of those services. We've been discussing migrating away from Cloudflare recently due to their refusal to deny services to sites that endanger people's offline security and incite and target people for offline harassment and physical violence. That conversation became more urgent yesterday when, in a blog post about the campaign to encourage Cloudflare to behave more responsibly regarding the types of sites they enable to remain on the internet, Cloudflare's CEO revealed that they regret past enforcement actions where they closed the accounts of sites containing child sexual abuse material and sites that advocate for white supremacist terrorism.

We do not believe we can ethically continue to retain the services of a company that could write that blog post. As those of you who've been with us for a while know, our guiding principles involve supporting our users' expression to the maximum extent possible, and we reaffirm our commitment to protecting as much of your content that's unpopular but legal under US law as we can. However, we also believe it's more vital, not less, for a company with such free-speech maximalist views to have clear, concrete, and well-enforced policies regarding content that does cross their lines, including refusing to provide services to sites that actively incite and manufacture threats to people's physical safety, contain child sex abuse material, or advocate or instruct people how to conduct terrorism. That Cloudflare refuses to refuse services to those types of sites, and has expressed regret about the instances in the past where they have refused services to those types of sites, means we feel we can no longer ethically retain their services.

Things may be slightly bumpy for a bit as we make the transition and work to find the best replacements for the services we've been relying on Cloudflare to provide. We're very sorry for any slowdowns or downtime that may happen over the next week and a half or so, and we hope you'll bear with us as we make the move.

[EDIT: Because there are many of you and one of me, please check the comments before replying to see whether your issue has been addressed! Also, in accordance with the official DW community comment guidelines, please refrain from personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters: all of those will be screened.]

[EDIT 7:12pm EDT: Because the temperature of many comments is frustratingly high, people don't seem to be reading previous replies before commenting as requested, and some people are just spoiling for a fight, I'm screening all comments to this entry by default while I can't be directly in front of the computer for the remainder of the day. We'll unscreen comments intermittently for the rest of the night as we have time, and I'll systematically unscreen all good-faith comments that don't contain personal attacks, insults, slurs, generalizations about a group of people due to race/nationality/religion, and comments that are posted only to mock other commenters when I return.]

[Edit 9/2 6:05pm EDT: having left comment screening on overnight, and seeing the percentage of abusive, bad-faith, or detached-from-reality comments, comment screening will remain on for this entry indefinitely. I'll keep an eye on it for another day or two and unscreen what needs to be unscreened, but probably not longer after that.]

Comments

[igenlode]

My beef with Cloudflare is simply that I'm starting to encounter increasing numbers of sites where Cloudflare have erected a security wall which prevents my viewing the contents at all -- I can no longer read any of the stories on fanfiction.net, for example. I can understand the possible need to check security before users can *submit* data (although amateur fiction is hardly the stuff of gold-dust), but what kind of security checks are involved in viewing free content on fanfiction or historical journal sites?

[dewline]

That is...disturbing in its own ways. Certainly worthy of some investigation.

[rachelindeed]

Just want to say I support your decision and am grateful for your integrity in running this site.

[sistawendy]

Good on you for getting away from Cloudflare.

[twistedchick]

No issues here, only support for what you are doing. May it all go well.

[ermingarden]

I know it's already been said a hundred times in other folks' comments, but thank you for making this decision! Your commitment to running DW with ethical clarity is one of the things that makes me proud to be part of this site community.

[argylepiratewd]

Thank you for continuing to be wonderful. 💖

[mizerable]

Thank you for the heads up. I 100% agree with the decision.

[luckyzukky]

i'm glad that you've come to this decision and have stayed committed to yours and the site's values in light of cloudflare's bullshit. i'm sorry you have to deal with this entitlement in the comments in response to an understandable and ethical decision like this but i hope you and other DW admins/volunteers have a great week at the very least -- i can't imagine having the stress of such a volatile comment section on top of the general agitation caused by having to divide cloudflare's services between several providers. all in all, thank you so much for making the right choice, and i hope you and everyone at DW is able to relax in the near future after this mess. DW is incredibly important to me and i appreciate all the work you do for it, including decisions like these. <3

[joseph_teller]

Glad to know that you are dealing with this situation and moving the system to a new system that will handle the needs of keeping dreamwidth operating and moving it to safe services providers.

[sabotabby]

This is 100% why I love this platform. Thank you for making this such a safe, inclusive, and welcoming space—one of the few such places left on the internet.

[inkycompass]

Thank for doing this and for taking such a conscientious approach to a difficult issue.

[kindkit]

Thank you!

[genarti]

I really appreciate how thoughtful and transparent you are about issues like this! Thank you so much for this, and for all you do.

[darjeeling]

Imagine showing your whole ass to the world by being all "WELL AKSHUALLY human trafficking, terrorism, and child sexual abuse aren't THAT bad" like some people are doing on this post. Y I K E S

Thank you Denise and Mark, for having a strong sense of morals, and whatever downtime there ends up being is a pittance of inconvenience for a very good cause. Dreamwidth is a bright spot and we appreciate you guys.

[squirrelitude]

As someone deeply invested in free speech, and understands the responsibility that comes with it -- thank you. I don't think people realize how much more work it is to support ethical free speech than to just accept unrestricted speech. The latter is often *laziness*. There may be some philosophy involved, but I strongly suspect that Cloudflare also wants to shed (legal) responsibility.

(Also, as someone who is uncomfortable with how Cloudflare has managed to insert themselves as MITM for like half the internet, I'm sure not unhappy to see them losing customers.)

[denise]

I try really hard to avoid using the phrase "free speech" when talking about DW and our content policies and the like, because (in the US at least, and we've been exporting it to the rest of the world lately; sorry about that, y'all) it immediately conjures up a whole host of associated assumptions people carry around about it. That's why I do very deliberately try to always use phrases like "maximum range of expression that we can" or talk about defending "unpopular speech" or the like, because it's like the phrase "free speech" is a tripwire that causes everyone around it to need to roll a d20 for their saving throw against "allcaps ranting", I swear. (Sorry. Can you tell the drugs are kicking in? Lol.)

But yeah: abdicating your content policy decisions to "is it legal" with no further nuance, especially when you're a multinational company, is impossible and dangerous. And I say that as someone who did, literally, start with "is it legal" as the baseline for DW content policy, and still uses it as a major factor! The difference is that although we start with the presumption that legal speech should be permitted, we also recognize that there's categories of legal speech that make the site objectively worse for everyone (spam, trolling, breaking into abandoned accounts and using them for spamming or selling the account names, etc) or that can have severe and pervasive offline consequences (doxxing, phishing, posting financial information, etc).

Some of those legal-but-atmosphere-ruining things we work around with technical solutions (almost every form of unwanted contact is handled like this, with people able to ban accounts and us treating using an alternate account to knowingly evade a ban as a ToS violation); some of them require content moderation actions, like suspending spammers or removing people's personal information from view. We don't make those deviations from "is it legal" lightly, and we only do it when it involves the quality and viability of the site experience for everyone. But those deviations are necessary sometimes, and Cloudflare pretending you can just handwave away two decades of our ongoing professional conversation about when those deviations are vital means that their company values are just so alien to ours that we don't feel we can continue to do business with them.

[springheel_jack]

Obviously correct line

[lluvia]

Thank you so much for all you do. ♥♥♥

[tobesomeone]

Highly approve of this decision, thank you guys so much for this. A few hiccups are worth it, we'll all manage some how haha.

[smugreport]

I wasn’t sure if you guys would be in a position to drop cloudflare even with the recent information that’s come to light, but I’m really glad you are. It gives me a lot of faith in the DW team that you’ve chosen to change providers and show where your priorities are wrt your user base.

[pebbleinalake]

Thank you for making this decision! Also, thanks for the heads up on the downtime. I hope the transition goes well <3

[erinm_4600]

I send your team good vibes for the migration. Thank you for all your hard work ♥

[wraithmoon]

Integrity seems to be a dying art these days and to see that this choice was made with this intact speaks volumes.

Thank you for upholding such a decision and for all the hard work you put into this site. Take the time you need to change what you need to. It's being done with a good conscious.

[denise]

Thank you. We're not perfect and we never will be (because we're people, and people fuck up) but we do our best to wrestle with these hard questions and to live up to the ideals and guiding principles we set out for ourselves when we started, and one of the things we decided was that as long as we have the opportunity, we'll choose vendors who match our principles as much as possible. It isn't always possible, but in this case, we can choose vendors who actually engage with these questions with more appropriate nuance, so we believe it's our obligation to do so.

[the_shoshanna]

You, your team, and your site all absolutely rock. Thank you for this decision and this post.

(I confess I'm curious what direction you expected the comment fight to go in!)

[purpleallison]

A small inconvenience of site slowdown or temporary inaccessibility is a perfectly acceptable result of switching away from horrible companies/people. Good for you!

[lina_trinch]

Thank you for this and for all of the other work you do to keep this site going, not to mention how professional you remain in the face of what I can only describe as ignorance towards law, business, and what "free speech" actually means. Cloudflare is free to express their regret about once not hosting sites based on bigotry and violence, just as you're free to leave their platform and do business elsewhere, a decision which I and many others support.

Anyway, the heads up about downtime is greatly appreciated. Again, thank you for everything. ♥

[denise]

Exactly this! I think I've said it a few times already, but: if it were a case of a government telling Cloudflare what their policy should be, I would absolutely be right there defending their right to make their own policy decisions without governmental interference. This isn't that case, though. This is us (and, we hope, others) deciding that we no longer want to do business with a company whose answer to the complicated, unanswerable questions of content moderation is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ instead of engaging with any of the impossible balancing tests and compromises any service has to wrestle with regularly. Content policy and content moderation is an impossible set of hard choices, and I absolutely sympathize with their desire to try to chuck all those choices out the window instead of wrestling with them. (And to be fair, sometimes I'd love to be able to do the same.) But providers do have the responsibility to at least try to answer those questions for themselves, and we think providers in the "as permissive as possible" space have a greater responsibility to work through those questions and try to find answers that balance the "as permissive as possible" against "without causing people severe offline harm".

Cloudflare is absolutely free to set their content policies and AUPs any way they'd like, even "we will never remove a customer from our security product for any reason". We aren't doing this to pressure them to change their policies; they probably won't ever notice we left, and that's fine. We simply prefer to direct our money to vendors who more closely match our principles.