They could. Let me know when it happens

I have this argument every time self hosting comes up, and every time I wonder if someone will do it to me to make a point. Or if one of the like million other comments I post upsets someone or one of the many tools that I host. Yet to happen, idk

I've had my involvement with the computer underground.

A web site owner published something he really shouldn't have and got hacked. I wound up being a "person of interest" in the resulting FBI investigation because I was the weirdest person in the chat room for the site. I think it drove them crazy I was using Tor so they got somebody to try to entrap me into sharing CP but (1) I'm not interested and (2) know better than that.

That's definitely the most interesting response I've had to this question, thanks for that

Will have to give this a second thought but as a first one now that I read this: ...and would Cloudflare have helped against the FBI, or any foreign nation doing a request with Cloudflare against child porn? Surely not?! A different kind of opsec is surely more relevant there, so I don't know if it's really relevant to "normal", legal self hosting (as opposed to criminal, much less that level of unethical+criminal) communities or if there's an aspect I'm missing here

Not everybody wants to manage some commercial grade packet filter that can handle some DDoSing script kiddie, it’s a strong argument.

But another argument against using the easiest choice, the near monopoly, is that we need a diverse, thriving ecosystem.

We don’t want to end up in a situation where suddenly Cloudflare gets to dictate what is allowed on the web.

We have already lost email to the tech giants, try running your own mail sometime. The technical aspect is easy, the problem is you will end up in so many spam folders it’s disgusting.

What we need are better decentralized protocols.

Please do try running your own mail some time. It's not nearly as hard as doomers would have you think. And if you only receive, you don't have any problems at all.

At first, you can use it for less serious stuff until you see how much it works.

I do, I host my own mail server.

Technically it's not very challenging. The problem is the total dominance of a few actors and a lot of spammers.

I haven't had spam issues since using a catch-all and giving everyone a unique address, blocking ones that receive spam

Won't work if you need a fixed address on a business card or something, but in case you don't...

Waiting for the day they catch on. Then it's time for a challenge-response protocol I guess