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

[ninetydegrees]

Thanks for making this decision and taking the time to inform us. Good luck with the migration.

[baggyeyes]

Thank you for this decision. I’m also glad you’ve provided excellent details for switching away from Cloudflare.

[xochiquetzl]

Thank you. ♥

[ashkitty]

Sometimes the best we can do, especially when we're small fry and can't exercise a lot of leverage, is to still live (and spend money) in a way where we're not making things worse. Every time I tell someone I won't patronize whatever business because their values don't align with mine, there's somebody asking "What, you think losing your business is going to matter to them? They're laughing all the way to the bank." And that may be, but my point is to not be part of it. So I get and appreciate what you're doing here. I hope the transition goes smoothly and we'll all survive a few glitches!

(Also...it's a back end service; I'd venture the people getting worked up in the comments wouldn't even notice it happened if you weren't so transparent in telling us. Anyway, thanks for continuing to be decent humans.)

[sackform]

Very much appreciate the considered but firm approach to this you've taken. It's one of the many reasons even though I don't use dw much these days I still support the site where I can and direct people here


Hoping the shit storm from people who can't understand the difference between "we do not want to do business with people who are okay supplying services to people who don't effectively remove actual CSEM from their websites" and "we support unilateral censorship including of fictional material" isn't too bad and you can weather it without too much stress.

[sackform]

Would we be able to get confirmation that you're still going ahead with moving away from cloudflare even though they're dropping kf? While it's great they've caved to the pressure, their ethics are still highly questionable and it seems like the right move.

[denise]

We are still migrating our services to different providers, yes.

[dreema]

Thanks for doing this, and i'm sorry you're getting grief over it.
*sends virtual tea and biscuits*

[raininshadows]

Cloudflare has announced they're dropping KiwiFarms, but only because of their behavior in the past 48 hours or so. Are you planning to stick with them because they did finally dump them, or leave because they're still saying KiwiFarms was fine before that?

[denise]

We are still migrating our services to different providers, as their subsequent blog post makes it clear that they have no intention of actually enforcing their AUP in the future without a costly and dangerous pressure campaign and that they still regret having enforced their AUP in the past.