I was a very early user of Cloudflare before they went public, back when they had just launched for everyone and were helping disenfranchised people (marginalized groups, whistleblowers, opposition parties, etc) who might be targets of DDoS attacks to protect their sites and their speech. There still seems to be an element of that, despite being beholden to shareholders now. I still to this day think they offer some of the best web tools for performance and security to site owners. Their workers platform shits all over the competition. AWS Lambda functions doesn’t come close imo, for example.

I am aware of the MitM threat they pose for certain types of data since they decrypt traffic for analysis and to apply WAF rules. But I’m not sure if they’re as big of a threat to try and shut down relays. People then shouldn’t use a Fastly, Hetzner, AWS, GCP, DO, Linode, etc or any public hosting company. Of course it’d be best if people had a server at their physical home. A bit unrealistic for many, even though I do.

Nosflare makes it stupid easy to deploy a Nostr relay and for very low cost compared to traditional bare metal or rented VPS. Nosflare using workers is scalable vertically and horizontally, has very limited attack surface compared to legacy hosted relays, can absorb millions of concurrent users, has no defined storage limit, is globally distributed and extremely fast, and more. But, the code is FOSS, so someone could refactor it for a different serverless environment if they wanted.

Let them try to shut us all down 😈 (even though I don’t think it’ll ever get to that point, I hope 🤞)