Some great takes on balancing corporate ethics against other needs from Jannis of Magic Pages.
But here’s the thing: this criticism applies to nearly every major infrastructure provider. AWS hosts plenty of questionable content. So does Google Cloud. So does Hetzner, where my actual servers live (in fact, Hetzner is one of the biggest sources of spam in the world – just check your web server logs and see who the IPs belong to that hammer your websites 24/7). The further down the stack you go, the harder it becomes to draw clean ethical lines.
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I think the underlying tension here is about purity versus pragmatism.
In an ideal world, I’d use a European CDN with a European WAF, run by a company with a spotless ethical record and reasonable pricing. That company doesn’t exist, trust me. I looked.
So the question becomes: do I hold out for a perfect solution that isn’t available, or do I make the best decision I can with the options in front of me?
I chose pragmatism. Not because I don’t care about these issues but because I have 1,200 customers who need their sites to work, who need protection from spam attacks, and who are paying me to make these decisions on their behalf.
If a European provider emerges that can match Cloudflare’s capabilities at comparable prices, I’ll look at switching. I’d genuinely prefer that. But I’m not going to sacrifice the stability of Magic Pages on the altar of ideological purity. Ideological purity is rampant on the Indieweb, Fediverse, and Bluesky and it’s a cancer.