Cloudflare has been surprisingly pro net neutrality for a company of their size, and serves sites like The Nation of Islam, Gab, and godhatesfags.com, and in the past it served Daily Stormer, which they dropped only due to political pressure. I've seen people speculate that the recent dropping of Kiwi Farms was likewise due to pressure. As a consequence of this, they've been harassed by the ADL. Criticism of Cloudflare should therefore be viewed with skepticism.

The article starts by raising legitimate concerns, but ends with the unfounded claim that Cloudflare is a honeypot. Are they being tapped by the NSA? This is implied, but there's no evidence of that. In what way is it a honeypot?

I have accessed Saidit exclusively through Tor. Yes, often I'm throttled out of accessing the website and then I come back later. At other times it takes 5 seconds to start a session, during which I look at another tab before coming back. I'm almost never served a captcha, and when I am, changing the circuit for Saidit usually works. Yes, I have to have JS enabled. But disabling it will break many websites separate from their use of Cloudflare. Personally I've given up on browsing without JS. Browsing Saidit like this is doable for me, although I'll admit it's a nuisance.

At the bottom of that page, you'll see that one of the people who's criticizing Cloudflare is Isis Agora Lovecruft, who defamed Jacob Appelbaum of the Tor Project in 2016, and Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd in 2019, in both cases by accusing them of rape. Appelbaum denied the accusations and he was never charged with a crime. Peter Todd sued Lovecruft for defamation, and if I'm interpreting this page correctly, he partially won that case. Appelbaum also testified for this case.

Why am I bringing this up? Because it's shady. I've always suspected that there was a hidden CIA hand in those accusations, as part of their effort in neutralizing high-profile activists. Appelbaum had to leave the Tor Project, after all. If my intuition is correct, that could be a hint that the entire page you linked to is part of a coordinated attack against Cloudflare.

I do find that Cloudflare disrupts the Tor browsing experience in general, but that's because of the settings. Saidit attracts much more attention from adversaries with DDoS capabilities than the average website, yet their settings are such that it's still browsable, so clearly that's possible.

Cloudflare fulfills legitimate needs, such as a reverse proxy and DDoS protection. I've looked at en.action.md, but it doesn't provide an alternative for either of these things. What do you recommend? I'm genuinely curious. I'm considering going with Cloudflare for my project Rabbit Hole, although admittedly I don't feel entirely comfortable partaking in such centralization.

See also: Is Cloudflare a privacy champion or hate speech enabler?