Cloudflare is an exclusive walled garden that excludes several demographics of people. I am in Cloudflare’s excluded group. This means:
when an LW user posts an image, I am blocked from seeing it. Images do not get mirrored onto the federated nodes.
when I encounter an LW community with very little content and I then need to visit the LW host to see what’s there before deciding whether to subscribe, I am blocked. I can only see content that got mirrored into the local timeline. There are various circumstances where visiting the source host is necessary but Cloudflare ruins that option.
CF nodes like LW breaks the fedi in arbitrary ways that undermine the fedi design and philosophy. So the use case is to get rid of the pollution. To get broken pieces out of sight and unbury the content that is decentralised, inclusive, open and free. To reach conversations with people who have the same values and who oppose digital exclusion, oppose centralised corporate control, and who embrace privacy. It’s also necessary to de-pollute searches. If I search for “privacy”, the results are flooded with content from people and nodes that are antithetical to privacy. Blocking fixes that. If I take a couple min. to block oxymoron venues like lemmy.world/c/privacy and do the same for a dozen other cloudflared nodes, then search for “privacy” again, I get better results.
When crossposting from Lemmy, there is a pulldown list of target communities which is another search tool. That is broken when there are more communities than what fits in the box. And it’s often ram-packed with Cloudflare venues -- places that digital rights proponents will not feed. Blocking the junk CF-centralised communities makes it possible to select the target community I’m after.
So it works. The federated timeline is also more interesting now because it’s decluttered of exclusive places. The problem is that it’s more tedious that it needs to be. I am blocking hundreds of LW communities right now. It probably required 500 clicks to get the config that I have right now and I probably have hundreds of more clicks to go. When in fact I should have simply been able to enter ~10 or nodes.