Mr. Munroe probably didn’t intend it, but the diagram also shows the problem with monopolies, duopolies and similar concentrations of stuff. The original design for the Internet was something that was so distributed that it could survive even if some key nodes were nuked. But, the modern Internet depends way too much on just a few companies: cloudflare, google, meta, amazon, etc.

Except AWS-US-EAST-1 is one of the big boxes, and so is cloudflare.

Nice, what was the “Host” in that case? www.cloudflare.com?

Maybe, but OP’s found the ideal site if you just want husky bloopers.

X is pretty small.

Elon Musk bought Twitter for something like $41b, and now it’s worth maybe half that. Cloudflare alone is worth almost double the pre-Musk market cap of Twitter. Spotify is a relatively small player in the “Internet Content and Information” space, dominated by companies like Google and Meta, but it’s still worth more than triple the pre-Musk market cap, at more than $120b. Current X is about the size of Zillow, currently valued at about $16b.

As a small company that is focused on spreading propaganda and hate speech, building a robust CDN isn’t a core part of X’s business, so it’s normal they’d outsource that. Companies like Meta and Google are big enough to justify doing that in-house.

Interesting, good job cloudflare for at least being able to serve the correct error message.

Yeah, the other fat chunky leg could be AWS. But neither is that tiny pillar supporting everything.

Whether intentional or not, that XKCD comic also pointed out a problem that even when some of the other things holding up the entire modern internet are huge, they’re still a problem because there aren’t very many of them, so half the Internet depends on them.

You are to be compared with tech billionaires, with their immense wealth and layered support systems, but with none of the money or resources. It manifests in what people expect of you, and how people talk about you.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/11/my-next-chapter-with-mastodon/

People need to realize that open source projects don’t create billionaires. In fact, they actually block billionaires from forming.

Tech deci-millionaires get rich by creating a moat around something, then put a toll booth at the drawbridge. Tech billionaires do that but make sure to enclose something essential they have a monopoly on within the moat, and then capture any and all regulators who might try to interfere. Open Source software either makes it illegal to build a moat or allows anybody who’s interested to build their own drawbridge. It’s orders of magnitude harder to get rich with open source or free software. You basically have to put up a toll booth that’s fully optional and somehow still get people to pay.

We should all thank #JohnMastodon for his selfless acts, both starting Mastodon but also now knowing when to step down.

This makes me curious, was there actually a cloudflare error page with the error on the cloudflare cloud? I’m used to seeing the one where the error is on the host. But, for an error where the error shows as being on cloudflare, cloudflare’s systems would have to be working enough to serve the error page where they show that their cloud is the issue, but broken enough to not be able to serve the cached content.

A number of high-profile websites, including X and ChatGPT, went down for many on Tuesday, due to problems affecting major internet infrastructure firm, Cloudflare.

Blusky: the social media site where people post bloopers of pet videos featuring huskies. It’s a very small niche.

Even if the abstractions aren’t pointless, there’s a limit to how many levels of abstraction you can make sense of.

I’ve seen some projects that are very well engineered, with nice code, good comments, well named variables and functions. But, the levels of abstraction and nesting get so deep that you forget why you were digging by the time you get somewhere relevant.

What’s frustrating there is that you can’t blame someone else. It’s just a limit for how much your brain can contain.

Normally that only works if you have DRM that locks the games to your platform, so that people don’t get the hardware at a discount then use it to run someone else’s software.

But, in Valve’s case, it really has no competitors in the PC gaming space. That might not last forever, but it almost certainly will last as long as this PC / console is around.

And you insist you’re an adult.

Hmm, very childish.

You sound like a child who is so desperate to sound like an adult that they obsess over meaningless things like using the correct emojis.

What about the reed instruments where you have to give your instrument oral, and it’s your tongue and lip control which determines the note you produce?

You also make music nose by beating animal hide with sticks.

Are people also using eggplants improperly? And, you’re proud to never have said thank you?

You can also type “thanks” or “please”. Both of those show the hands together emoji.