title: Kiwifarms shows you that Cuckflare (and western corporations in general) can't be trusted as a hosting provider, again
author: 寮
date: 2022-09-04 12:40:00
tags:technology,internet,webdev
threadid: ANCyi8QYDA4n0iUl0q
----
I woke up this morning, opened up SNS, and found out that [Kiwifarms (a Pleroma instance) got shut down by Cuckflare](https://archive.ph/5ziDX), exactly what I was warning people about for a very long time.\
This is not a post meant to say who was right and who was not, but rather it's to once again shine a light at one of the dangers of hosting with Cuckflare, why you should never trust western corporations in general, and what you can do about it.

## Hosting with Cuckflare is dangerous

If you ask any tech savvy person that also happens to be politically right-leaning, they'll remind you of what happened to the Daily Stormer and 8chan.\
Both were hosted with Cuckflare, and both were taken down by that same Cuckflare.\
How it happened with the Daily Stormer was that it got tagged by the woke outrage mobs (which any reasonable person would just dismiss as spambots anyway) a lot, and Matthew Prince (the CEO of Cuckflare) would still have a hardened foot and said "nope, we're a neutral hosting provider, not going to take it down", but then they got just the enough amount of pressure from the mainstream media, tech-related news soytes, and even politicians, so that foot collapsed on itself, and Cuckflare has deplatformed Daily Stormer.\
Later on a similar thing happened to 8chan, except instead of using "nazi's" as an excuse, they used either Qanon or pedophillia, can't remember, but it was either of the 2.

Now the same thing happened again with Kiwifarms; Matthew refused to take it down, until he decided to take it down anyway.\
Again after getting enough pressure.

I should point out that Prince deplatformed Kiwifarms only 3 days after Prince [openly admitting](https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-rejects-role-as-internet-or-piracy-police-220901/) that deplatforming Daily Stormer and 8chan was a mistake, basically looking for forgiveness.\
Clearly Cuckflare can't be trusted as a hosting provider, an anti-DDoS soyvice, and all the other stuff.

Now I'm closely following the whole piracy saga, as the copyright (which is a scam) [MAFIAA](/glossary#mafiaa) worldwide is having Cuckflare in their crosshairs.\
To bring you up to speed on this one: [Japanese Manga publishers vs Cuckflare](https://torrentfreak.com/major-manga-publishers-prepare-to-sue-cloudflare-over-pirate-sites-220131/), [Americuck MAFIAA vs Cuckflare](https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-ace-seize-pirate-iptv-domains-press-cloudflare-to-hand-over-identitities-220213/), [the USSA vs Cuckflare](https://torrentfreak.com/broadest-us-pirate-site-injunction-rewritten-tamed-by-cloudflare-220704/), [Pizzastan vs Cuckflare](https://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-cloudflares-dns-resolver-1-1-1-1-to-block-pirate-sites-in-italy-220719/), [4th Reich's province of Austria vs Cuckflare](https://torrentfreak.com/austrian-isps-had-no-choice-but-to-block-pirate-sites-and-cloudflare-220829/).\
I ordered them on publishing date, but feel free to read them in any order you want.

The reason why I'm following it is because of the striking similarities to both the Daily Stormer and Kiwifarms saga's with Cuckflare standing firm of not obeying, and then cucking out and obeying anyway.\
So while pirates are safe with Cuckflare for now, expect it to no longer being the case really soon.

## Don't trust any western corporation

After having seen examples after examples of western corporations to be untrustworthy when it comes to guaranteeing free speech, it got to the point that I really can't trust any western corporation at all.\
The biggest reason is politics.\
In the west, politics influence business all the time.\
Left leaning businesses (which are the vast majority of them, including all the major ones) will be deplatforming you for anything that's not in support of "the current thing", any questioning of AUTHORTAH!! will get you cancelled.\
Right leaning businesses (usually smaller businesses, almost exclusively in the USSA) on the other hand won't deplatform you over questioning AUTHORITAH!!, but they will over drawings, anything that even remotely represents Japanese anime is enough for them to deplatform you.\
The only European right leaning business I know of is Bitchute, but Europeans in general are once again extremely sensitive towards anything related to world war 2, plus pretty much all tech savvy people in Europe tend to be soycialists from what I've seen (there are exceptions though), making them no different from hosting with a big tech corpo.\
However, from my experience visiting Europe a few times, there are 4 outlyers: Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, and Turkey.\
Netherlands and Denmark are more what I would call "soycial-capitalists", while Poland and Turkey are more like "capital-soycialists".\
And Ausjailian and New Xiland hosting providers come with the same issues as right leaning Americuck companies when it comes to drawings, although they don't seem to be as sensitive towards politics as the rest of the western world.

Japanese corporations are only concerned about copyright (which is a scam), and almost all will blindly cuck out to the artificial "laws" (which in itself are mostly illegal anyway), but other than that as long as you keep giving them money on time, they don't really care.\
Same is true for the rest of Asia; give them money, and they'll leave you the fuck alone.\
Just like how CHAINA!! handled western SJW's when they were complaining about Genshin Impact; they just ghosted them, exactly how you should do.

## What you can do instead of relying on Cuckflare

What if I told you that everything Cuckflare has to offer can be done without them?\
Why should you trust a corporation that is hostile towards you?

While most people use Cuckflare for DDoS stuff, some people use them for other soyvices.\
For DDoS mitigation, you can make sure you run decently written code on your server instead of using soyware.\
You can easily harden the server itself, like disabling password authentication for SSH (so you must have a trusted SSL key in order to log into your server), use iptables, nftables, or ufw to limit port listening to only 80 and 443, and whatever other ports you need to be available to the public, separate your Tor and I2P mirrors from your clearnet one, host a server at your own home (more about this in a minute) so you don't have to broadcast the SSH port (and any other port you don't need to broadcast) over the entire internet at all (limit it to only be available over LAN only), disable logging (or make it only log critical errors), and so on.\
The use of lightweight code is extremely important, as it makes a successful DDoS attack much more difficult.\
The reason why DDoS is made possible is exactly because of soyware being so heavy on resources.\
The clearnet server loli frog is hosting at her own residence is an 8 GiB RAM machine, and with all the websites running on it so far (which is quite a lot), the server itself uses only 150 MiB of RAM total, so good luck DDoS'ing that!

Another thing you can do is to mimick their DDoS mitigation by having multiple servers in multiple countries across the world.\
If one is taken down, make people point to a different server.

For SSL certificates, just use Let's Encrypt.\
Other than the fact that you have to renew once every 90 days, there's really nothing wrong with that.

For web hosting, get a decent VPS hosting at a decent provider.\
However, the problem with that is that there is no decent provider with API access these days.\
CloudVPS/TransIP, 1984 Hosting, Cock.li, and Njalla are pretty decent providers in Europe.\
CloudVPS and TransIP (they're the same provider nowadays), a Netherlands-based VPS hoster, provides API access, but doesn't take Monero.\
Cock.li (Romania) and Njalla (Sweden) on the other hand take Monero, but don't provide any API's.\
And 1984 (Iceland) provides neither.\
The reason why API's are important is simply because I prefer to manage everything using my own custom UI, which is especially helpful if your VPS's, object storage, domains, and DNS are spread out over many different providers.

A decent Japanese VPS hoster is ConoHa, but they don't take Monero, and on top of that are shilling hard for SDGs.\
Plus they're using Goolag reCAPTCHA for login, and last time I had to login, they wasted 10 minutes of my time on clicking stupid boxes.

Some of the bigger VPS hosters like Linode and Vultr all rely on Cuckflare, and especially Linode is known for deplatforming you over DMCA (which is a scam) claims, and they won't even take the time to check whether the claim is actually true or not, they just kick you no questions asked.

You can as well get yourself a static IP address.\
Here in Japan there's a service called Interlink that provides static IP addresses for cheap, and their IP location is pointing to one of their datacenters instead of your residence, so there's no danger in doxing your real location in this case.\
I'm sure similar services exist in other parts of the world, and I highly recommend you look into it.\
Apart from paying for the IP address and the usual electricity bills, you're basically hosting any spec server you want for free.\
And even if you take the IP address fees and the usual monthly bills into account, overall it's still way cheaper than using a VPS hosting, and on top of that more censorship resistant too.

Not really related to Cuckflare alternatives, but it does help.\
I recommend you use OpenProvider for domain name registration.\
They offer a huge selection of TLDs to choose from, prices are pretty low (and often provide insane discounts too, like the .site domain was literally free of charge at the time I registered it), and they don't even care if your name and address are fake.\
They even provide options to use their addresses for TLDs that require a local address in order to register.
