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

[nenya_kanadka]

Hah! My second thought about this post (after "Good!") was that yep, this is still a case of distinguishing between fiction and reality! ("Your fanfiction is terrible and shouldn't exist" being the version of this debate I run into most commonly.) You are taking actions based upon demonstrated real-world harm to real people, not out of some moral panic over writing that squicks you out. It's entirely consistent and is exactly what we mean when we say that there is a difference between the two.

[denise]

Oh Lord, that whole thing about fictional content is one of those times it's convenient for us to just point at "is it legal" and tap the sign, because I have lived through *several* moral panics now and the one we are currently in is not fun.

But yeah. There's an immense difference between fictional content and conduct that has concrete, tangible, offline harm. (Not trying to police your use of the term at all, but I personally try to avoid "real-world", because dammit, after 20+ years of us all living, working, and socializing online, and *especially* after the pandemic and associated virtual event shift, "online" *is* also the real world.) But there's also a huge difference between "someone posted a link to my Twitter account" and "someone posted a link to the GPS coordinates of my house", and the potential consequences of both are wildly different. Smart policy needs to recognize that!

[nenya_kanadka]

Oh yeah, no question that online is also part of the "real world" -- if I'd been typing slower I would have caught that, since I feel the same way that the internet is a mode of communication rather than some plane of existence utterly separate from "real" life. It's all real, just some of it is face-to-face and some isn't.

[denise]

Yeah, I catch myself slipping all the time too, heh. It was just so ubiquitous a term for so long, and I've been trying to make myself make the change because people do treat the internet as though it's some magical land where "the real world"'s laws and customs don't apply! It really is insiduous, though, isn't it? (It's the same reason I trained myself into saying "wallet name", as in, the name that's on the cards in your wallet, instead of "real name". rahaeli is my real name, goddammit, I've been using it and answering to it, both online and f2f, for 23 years! It's just not the name on the cards in my wallet because legally changing your name in my state is a pain in the ass and I don't want to deal with constantly explaining "no, it's lowercase because I started using it on services that couldn't uppercase usernames and now it just looks wrong in uppercase"!)

[nenya_kanadka]

Exactly!

As Terry Pratchett (GNU) said, most people seem to inhabit worlds circling around their own heads anyway. We are our thoughts and words and relationships, in some very real sense, as much as we are also our bodies. Intangible isn't unreal (even aside from how many physical things it takes to make an internet).

And "wallet name" is such an incredibly useful term. Your "real" name is the name you answer to. The one you choose as "yeah, that's me." Which is a principle that actually stood me in good stead when I first learned about trans folks and name changes. Oh, your real name isn't the one the government has on file? Or you have more than one "real" name? Cool! Same for all my friends!

(And then I figured out I was nonbinary, and yeah, I do go by a different form of my wallet name offline these days, but also, I've been Nenya for twenty years and that was a name I chose for myself and it's been realer than the wallet name for literal decades at this point, so... Your real name is the one you answer to. It's all one world with many facets. What we do on this series of tubes does matter!)

[sporky_rat]

I use 'meatspace' for this a lot, and it works oddly well, although it gets me some hilarious faces face to face.