With the recent willingness of the US Government to pressure its tech agencies into revealing user data without a proper judicial warrant, we’ve decided it’s overdue for us migrate away from Cloudflare.

We’ll be transitioning our sites over to https://deflect.ca/ over the next week or so, starting with pixelfed first before doing lemmy and piefed.

I hope to be able to do this without any noticeable downtime, but it is a major config change that will require some backend changes as well. I’ll make an announcement before/after and you can always check https://status.fedecan.ca/

Update Feb 16: pixelfed has been migrated to deflect

Update Feb 20: I’m working with deflect on improving performance before migrating lemmy / piefed over. Currently pixelfed load times aren’t great due to traffic often hitting edge nodes way out in Europe

Update Mar 17: Unfortunately performance with Deflect isn’t where I want it to be since their nodes are out East and our server is in Vancouver. As a result we’re just going to be dropping the CDN altogether and hosting directly off our server. I’m planning to do the switchover this weekend (March 20-22), but in the meantime you can use https://test.lemmy.ca/ or https://test.piefed.ca/ if you’d like to bypass Cloudflare.

  • rinze@lemmy.caEnglish
    48·
    2 months ago

    As a European (but who lived for 10 years in Montreal, that’s why I have an account here) I applaud any initiative to move digital infrastructure away from the US. Good luck.

  • Slyke@lemmy.caEnglish
    42·
    2 months ago

    Post this on Reddit too, so more people come here. /r/BuyCanadian is a good sub for posting this.

    • Otter@lemmy.caMEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      Last I saw, they had rules against self promotion. I’m not sure if this qualifies, but at the very least we could post it in their self promotion specific thread.

    • GrindingGears@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      1 month ago

      The reddit mods get very angry when you suggest links away from their little fiefdoms. An ultra sensitive bunch they are.

  • VieuxQueb@lemmy.caEnglish
    28·
    2 months ago

    That’s some great news. Even without the current horrible state of the US, just CloudFlare itself is getting to be a problem anyway.

  • Vex_Detrause@lemmy.caEnglish
    19·
    2 months ago

    Thanks for all the hard work! I totally don’t understand hosting/managing the community I bet it’s a huge task. Thank you!

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Sweet I’ve been interested in Deflect as an alternative to CF since I noticed Cory Doctorow using it on his ‘pluralistic’ website.

  • bdonvr@thelemmy.clubEnglish
    10·
    2 months ago

    What are your Cloudflare metrics for unique visitors? I’d be very curious how it compares to your billing in Deflect.

    I run a small Lemmy instance and I’m showing an insane 5M unique visitors per month. I’m sure that’s mega-inflated by federations or bots though. If Deflect charged me for even a fraction of that I’d be bankrupted.

  • melsaskca@lemmy.caEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I’m no techie but if this moves us towards the light and away from the darkness then I’m all for it.

    • hoserhobbes@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      23 days ago

      Their basic hosting and storage plans seem good, but I’m always disappointed when I look at any Canadian hosting for VPS prices. I’d love to use a Canadian VPS alongside or instead of my Hetzner VPS - but the prices always seems to be 2-3+x what Hetzner offers.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    14 days ago

    Sorry to hear the update, but perhaps you can gently tug Deflect to hopefully expand to Metro Van or Alberta.

    • Shadow@lemmy.caOPMEnglish
      4·
      14 days ago

      They’re depending on VPS providers and as far as I know there just aren’t any good DDoS resilient ones out west. They also don’t have anycast or geodns, so which node you hit is just a dice roll. Unfortunately there’s just no good competition to cloudflare.