cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/33983108
Obviously it’s not smart to switch to a Cloudflare-plagued network like that of Matrix if your goal is to escape US tech giants. For strictly internal use on self-hosted instances, sure. But as soon as a matrix room becomes open public Cloudflare rears its ugly head.
Zulip and SimpleX are probably better options. Certainly IRC is a better option so long as the channel has no Matrix gateway. SimpleX is also free of Cloudflare.



Power is excessively unreasonably ceded when Cloudflare is in the loop. To avoid CF is to put power back where it belongs. Cloudflare-incompatible tech ensures CF does not wield inappropriate power.
Indeed, and this frustrates sigsec. Connecting to someone requires trusting them not to do something stupid like hand their keys to a giant centralised corporate overlord. At least avoiding Cloudflare is low-hanging fruit. It’s usually easy to detect when CF is in the loop, apart from a few rare shenanigans where CF uses some IPs that are not in CF’s ASN records.