The Switter stuff is a good reminder about why I'm so very uncomfortable with Cloudflare. I'm not blaming the people behind Cloudflare, who I think know and have expressed why FOSTA is dangerous, but rather Cloudflare's fundamental positioning as a source of centralization.
Content Addressed Storage > Content Delivery Networks
kɜ:ʳ 
@cwebber i wonder how difficult it would be to make mastodon use ipfs as a media storage system
(then instances wouldn't need to transfer media directly, they just give each other ipfs hashes and the instance brings it into the local cache)
(and, instances could evict old media with a reasonable guarantee that it'll still exist somewhere in IPFS for later retrieval if necessary)
@chr IPFS is a good start. Whether or not IPFS is precisely the right solution (I'm a Filecoin skeptic) or not is up for debate, but being a content addressed system is the right thing.
This is one reason I gain a lot of hope from Peertube's work in bridging P2P media delivery with the fediverse (thank you @Chocobozzz and contributors!)
@cwebber Centralised systems are vulnerable, evil, or both.
@liw best quote I've read in a while
@cwebber The real issue I think is you can get knocked offline very easily and providers like AWS may leave you with very little recourse if you're on the receiving end of a large DDOS or similar.
@cwebber
The situation is made much worse by the fact that many centralized services (like Cloudflare) are based in the US and subject to US law.
@cwebber Back in the mid '90s I figured everyone would build their own "pull" caching infrastructure. But it always seemed as if the web was being intentionally built to sabotage any such effort. And now TLS makes it pretty much impossible.
Something like CoralCDN with self-certifying URLs and the ability/expectation for providers to PITM it might work. You'd need some way to get around the mixed content problem, though.
@cwebber
I mean its getting to the point that CDNs are becoming "the internet". And thats shitty/scary