The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
positiveblue.substack.com
The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
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Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#2I would love that vision to become reality but what Cloudflare is doing is unfortunately necessary atm.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#3I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#4I would love to get off Cloudflare but there are no real good alternatives
AWS is an alternative no?
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#5I have zero issue with Ai Agents, if there's a real user behind there somewhere. I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI - it's really annoying realising that we're tying up several cpu cores on AI crawling. Less than on real users and google et al.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#6Maybe the title means something more like "The web should not have gatekeepers (Cloudflare)". They do seem to say as much toward the end:
>We need protocols, not gatekeepers.
But until we have working protocols, many webmasters literally do need a gatekeeper if they want to realistically keep their site safe and online.
I wish this weren't the case, but I believe the "protocol" era of the web was basically ended when proprietary web 2.0 platforms emerged that explicitly locked users in with non-open protocols. Facebook doesn't want you to use Messenger in an open client next to AIM, MSN, and IRC. And the bad guys won.
But like I said, I hope I'm wrong.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#7I understand the concerns around a central gatekeeper but I'm confused as to why this specifically is viewed negatively. Don't website owners have to choose to enable cloudflare and to opt-in to this gate that the site owners control?
If this was cloudflare going into some centralized routing of the internet and saying everything must do X then that would be a lot more alarming but at the end of the day the internet is decentralized and site owners are the ones who are using this capability.
Additionally I don't think that I as an individual website owner would actually want / be capable of knowing which agents are good and bad and cloudflare doing this would be helpful to me as a site owner as long as they act in good faith. And the moment they stop acting in good faith I would be able to disable them. This is definitely a problem right now as unrestricted access to the bots means bad bots are taking up many cycles raising costs and taking away resources from real users
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#8I have zero issue with Ai Agents, if there's a real user behind there somewhere. I DO have a major issue with my sites being crawled extremely aggressively by offenders including Meta, Perplexity and OpenAI - it's really annoying realising that we're tying up several cpu cores on AI crawling. Less than on real users and google et al.
They're getting to the point of 200-300RPS for some of my smaller marketing sites, hallucinating URLs like crazy. It's fucking insane.
Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#9Re: The web does not need gatekeepers: Cloudflare’s new “signed agents” pitch
#10I recently ran a test on the page load reliability of Browserbase and I was shocked to see how unreliable it was for a standard set of websites - the top 100 websites in the US by traffic according to SimilarWeb. 29% of page load requests failed. Without an open standard for agent identification, it will always be a cat and mouse game to trap agents, and many agents will predictably fail simple tasks.
https://anchorbrowser.io/blog/page-load-reliability-on-the-t...
Here's to working together to develop a new protocol that works for agents and website owners alike.