Denise (![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png)
denise) wrote in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png)
dw_maintenance2022-09-01 01:11 pm
denise) wrote in dw_maintenance2022-09-01 01:11 pm
Potential downtime this weekend (2 Sept - 5 Sept)
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.]
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.]
no subject
The difference between Dreamwidth and certain other "small internet" "service providers" is Dreamwidth moves on and picks itself up, while other sites whine and cry and throw tantrums.
no subject
Yeah, they sound new. And also like they don't know what "most closely matches our values" means, or, indeed, any of the rest of Denise's comment.
no subject
It would be quite an embarrassment if they had to pick themselves up and move back to CloudFlare, even if they do it without whining and throwing tantrums.
no subject
Our deciding not to do business with Cloudflare because their values conflict with ours and we don't believe they've given their policies sufficient thought to balance the conflicting needs between maximizing permitted user expression and preventing verifiable, concrete offline harm: same deal. If Cloudflare's CEO ever sees this post, he's perfectly welcome to think we're ridiculous to do it. We aren't doing this to have any effect on Cloudfare; we're a tiny drop in the bucket of their revenue stream. Mark and I just agree on the ethical principle of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC, the company we co-own that runs dreamwidth.org, that say when we feasibly have a choice of providers for a given service, and we believe one of those providers is behaving in a fashion that conflicts with our principles as a company, we pick another provider who offers that service. It's happened before; it'll happen again.
We have regular discussions about all our business relationships and whether or not we believe we're making the most ethical choice of provider available, given our limited resources and the current state of the business. We fired our accountant this year because he tried to persuade us to take out a fraudulent loan under the governmental COVID relief loan program. Owning a business means making choices about who you do business with, and we choose to prioritize factors other than cost or popularity more highly in making those choices than some other businesses do (or are able to do).
I apologize that I apparently phrased the notification to our users of the potential downtime that comes with changing DNS and CDN providers, along with an explanation of why we're making the move, in such a way that you felt it was "a tantrum", but this is how we communicate around here; we're extremely casual in how we write and speak, because we're four individual people running this site and not an entire marketing team carefully crafting every message to be as bland as possible. If our choices of service providers, our reasons for choosing those providers, or the way we communicate is as much of a deal-breaker for you as Cloudflare's refusal to remove clients that are not only causing verifiable offline harm but also blatantly breaking Cloudflare's expressly stated AUPs is a deal-breaker for us, I genuinely do wish you the best of luck in finding a site that matches your values more closely. We are always sorry to see someone leave because they disagree with our vision for the site or our principles as a business, but we don't and won't change that vision and those principles just because someone objects.
no subject
They learned that they don't have to bow to the whims of every other company out there just because those companies are popular and serve a lot of other websites. They learned that they can say no to other companies, and survive it.
Personally I think that's a great lesson to have learned.