The way CDNs and virtual hosts work in general is to read the host field in the HTTP header, otherwise unless you dedicate an IP for each domain / “web site” there would be no way to know what to serve.

But the point of CDNs is to direct connections to a geographically-near IP, yes?

The domain name that any CDN webserver in different regions will get in the HTTP request headers is going to be the same, CNAME or no.

The issue is if you put the CNAME of foo www.foo-cloudflare-cdn.com. then it will just resolve to whatever the A/AAAA record is for that, and send the host of www.foo.com – which they will only service if that domain is hosted with their nameservers (they run automated checks to make sure you’re actually doing so).

Ah, okay, I could see someone having automated checks that actively prevent it.

It's seen tech talks by Twitch's engineering team. Some of those folks are scary smart.

Not that it takes that much cleverness to avoid using CloudFlare, of course.

But might be related. Twitch had some clever fallbacks and work-arounds for slow Internet, in that tech talk.

Centralized is control. Control is profit. It’s already not “well”, that’s why we’re here discussing it.

c/selfhosted having a field day rn

I used Cloudflare tunneling for a while, then started to have similar thoughts. I'm off Cloudflare now.

An AI chatbot that pretends to be a character and you roleplay with it.

Had to include something AI because of the craze, probably picked at random

But the point of CDNs is to direct connections to a geographically-near IP, yes?

That's generally right enough, the goal of a CDN is to deliver content from a server close to the consumer as possible (ideally on their ISP network using cache servers to avoid going out over the "wider internet".) – however CDN networks typically also use Anycast IP addresses, which means that all of the CDN servers across their network use the same pool of IP addresses, and BGP / the routing table dictate what actual physical server you get routed to. This is typically the ideal closest server, however sometimes you want certain IP pools in certain regions for legal (China), or technical reasons, so the IP address returned by a given A/AAAA lookup for a CDN isn't a given.
There's also ECN and other optimization CDNs can do on the lookup side but that's outside of the scope here.

The domain name that any CDN webserver in different regions will get in the HTTP request headers is going to be the same, CNAME or no.

Yeah, so the CNAME just says "whatever A/AAAA address that resolves to" and the HTTP client will send whatever HOST it thinks its connecting to, meaning you can't "mask" the actual domain you're using by using a CNAME record.

Technically if you have a totally static IP serving a single site, it's possible to ignore the HOST field and always serve that site, since logically, any request is only meant for that given site (this is basically the default site on something like Apache).

My main point is that there's really no getting around that CloudFlare requires you to be locked in to their platform even if you just wanna serve R2 files from a subdomain, and I personally find that a bit spooky, migrating nameservers can have very long propagation times leaving your site unreachable if they decide they don't want you as a customer anymore, or as a shakedown.

See, there's still a niche for the internal combustion engine over electric. Good luck driving your tesla in a blackout!

And that other huge democracy ongoing attacks on its own cities and economy.

Yeah, wonder how those cloudflare(d) tunnels werd keeping up.

Everything is a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works

So tell me, how does the world work? We all hold hands and hug and cry together?

??? My shit is working.

You're funny.

Back in my day, we just told Cleverbot to suck our dicks

I'm super interested in alternative browsers but never have the time to test them. I always wonder what the Internet would be like if we built it from scratch right now instead of having the legacy of 30 years of development to support.

eventually