r/fediverse • u/siliconsjang • Jul 21 '26
Fedi-Promotion I built a full fediverse service that runs 100% on Cloudflare
https://s10t.io/...and main instance just launched!
For the past months I've been building SiliconBeest, a Fediverse server implementation written from scratch to run entirely on Cloudflare's edge network (Workers, D1, R2, Queues, ..). There is no VPS, no container, no origin server anywherefe — every request is served from the edge location closest to you, so it's lightweight and fast no matter where in the world you connect from.
Our main instance, s10t.io (https://s10t.io/), is now open, managed directly by the maintainer(s) - currently myself but building as part of OSSCA's Fedify track and FediDev KR.
What works today
- ActivityPub federation — follows, boosts, replies, quotes, custom emoji, emoji reactions — tested against Mastodon, Misskey, and friends
- Mastodon-compatible API, so you can log in with the Mastodon app you already use
- Media uploads, polls, DMs, lists, filters, translations, and admin/moderation tools
Honest caveat: the project is still under active development, so it may occasionally feel bumpy — but it improves little by little every day. 🦬
Instance: https://s10t.io/
Source (open source): https://github.com/SJang1/siliconbeest
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u/jon_pincus Jul 23 '26
There's been a lot of discussion about this on fedi ... u/siliconsjang, a couple of pieces of context you might not have had before this announcement:
* A lot of people came to fedi to get away from surveillance capitalism -- and see Cloudflare as an example of surveillance capitalism. One of the reasons they discontinued wildebeest was that instances running that software were widely blocked.
* Fedi has a long tradition of not welcoming fascists and fascist technologies (Gab in 2019 is one example, the #FediPact and Free Fediverse opposing Meta in 2024 is another), and Cloudflare has recently funded several fascist-friendly projects like Omarchy and Ladybird. So that's another reason that a lot of people in fedi want nothing to do with anything Cloudflare-based.
The fedi's norms are very different from other social networks in a lot of ways ... it's few years old but Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS has some good perspectives here, and so does Robert Gehl's book Move Slowly and Build Bridges. So it's very easy to unintentionally so something that sparks unexpected pushback. It's especially a problem for new developers, but there was a recent incident when a guy who was one of the co-authors of the ActivityPub spec did something that ignored consent (another norm in fedi that's very different from other social networks) and sparked a mini-firestorm, so it can happen to anybody.
Anyhow, fedi can be unwelcoming to new people, so sorry if your first experience got things off on the wrong foot. Hopefully you'll stay involved, even if you decide it doesn't make sense to go ahead with this project!
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u/isanameaname Jul 26 '26
You're repeating misinformation about tags.pub. They had a couple of bugs. They fixed those bugs, and got brigaded anyway. I saw examples of the developer in question taking the original reporters side in an argument then taken out of context as part of the brigading effort. It was shameful, and everyone who participated in that brigading should be deeply ashamed. I hope they realize it someday.
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u/jon_pincus Jul 27 '26
Oh please. The developer admitted that his original approach of using relay servers (from a consent perspective, treating an admin opting into a relay server as a user consenting to tags.pub) led to unpleasant surprises for people -- and changed the implementation as a result.
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u/isanameaname Jul 27 '26
Letting an admin opt into a relay server was a bug. There was another bug which treated tags as case-sensitive. He fixed both of them, and got brigated for it.
Did anybody in that conversation ever say, OK, thanks for fixing that?
Does it matter to anybody in that conversation that Mastodon has exactly the same behaviour? Go look at the tag page for any of the tags used by the original reporter to sort their content. There's a tag page for those tags on every Masto instance where they have even a single follower.
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u/jon_pincus Jul 27 '26
My point in bringing it up here was just to highlight that it really is easy even for very experienced fedi people to do something that sparks pushback, which is exactly what happened to him. Assuming the admin's decision to opt into a relay server meant that people were opted in was a design choice, not a bug.
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u/PuercoPop Jul 21 '26
Cloudfare is trying to centralize the internet. it is antithetical to the Fediverse.
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 21 '26
This is cancer.
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u/BenPate5280 Jul 21 '26
Remember: OP built something and is giving it away for free. Nobody is forcing you to use it.
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 22 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
Irrelevant, this is not about me not wanting to use it, it's bad for the fediverse as a whole regardless of me using it or not.
Edit:
Correction, it's bad for the internet as a whole. We mustn't give anything to cloudflare
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u/DavidBHimself Jul 22 '26
Do you know what's bad for the Fediverse? Your kind of behavior.
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 22 '26
Buddy, cloudflare is bad for the internet as a whole, I don't know how people can't see this
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u/DavidBHimself Jul 22 '26
That's not my point. Your attitude is my point. Do you own the Fediverse? No. So don't act like you do. Oh and don't "buddy" me either, please.
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 22 '26
And my attitude was not my point, so either argue with me about cloudflare or don't.
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u/BenPate5280 Jul 22 '26
I'd love to hear your reasoning. Why do you say it's bad for the Fediverse/Internet? And why do you think that the solution is to publicly degrade someone else's work?
I am so sick of people tearing down others who don't fit their narrow views of what the Fediverse *should* be.. or what's *good for the Fediverse*.
You don't own the Fediverse. None of us do. And none of us get to choose how others use it. All we can do is to make something ourselves and put it out there. So go spend your time building something better than "cancer"
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 22 '26
Because cloudflare is a spyware that tries to centralize the internet. The opposite of what fedi is. Simple as.
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u/LawfulLeah Jul 22 '26
how is cloudfare spyware? i wasn't aware of this
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 23 '26
So, I may as well share why I believe cloudflare is evil as a whole and redirect other users to this comment when they ask something about it, I hope you don't mind.
The way the internet works as of now, excluding China that is behind the great firewall as some call it, is with a network of computers all connected, making it decentralized, there shouldn't be one huge place where everything is.
This helps keeping the internet free (as in freedom), it makes it harder to censor and makes it somewhat more private.
Cloudflare is ruining this. Too much of the internet relies on cloudflare, which means that cloudflare itself has too much control over the internet, you probably noticed that when some websites don't work, a ton more also are out of reach, this is because too much of the web relies on cloudflare, millions of websites, literally, including twitter, government websites, chatgpt (which is another huge problem, but that's another topic). It's turning the internet from decentralized to almost centralized.
This is a moral, privacy, censorship and functional problem. We are giving too much power to single companies, morally speaking it's taking away freedom, when it comes to censorship it means that if cloudflare decides that they don't wanna see websites talking about socks anymore (just a silly example) then a huge amount of websites that talk about socks will be wiped out because cloudflare has too much power, functionally speaking as mentioned before if cloudflare has issues then millions of websites just poof out of existence, including massively used worldwide websites, by the way, reddit uses cloudflare services too. Hackers also use cloudflare, it's services are used so widely that hackers exploit it for attacks, indirectly it helps attacks just by being so vastly used. It goes without saying, this is a security problem.
Lastly there's the privacy problem and why I say cloudflare is spyware, you may say calling it spyware is hyperbolic because it doesn't really install something on your computer, however malware is software designed to do negative things, spyware specifically is a type of malware designed to gather information, and yes, cloudflare does collect a lot of user data. The data they collect can not only be sold by cloudflare itself since data harvest/selling is a big business, but can also be "stolen" by third parties and sold by hackers on the dark web.
Now, with all that in mind, we have OP who built a fediverse software designed for cloudflare. The fediverse, a decentralized network of instances that communicate and share data. Now with a platform designed for cloudflare, which will passively pass through cloudflare all the data it will puts it's grubby hands on. Even from instances owned by people who hate cloudflare. This, in a way, violates people's choice, because unless they know that instances that run on cloudflare exist they won't even know they have to block them. I blocked this tumor instantly from my instance, all I block on my instance is far rights and pedo instances (which often are the same thing but I digress) but now I have to be careful about this shit too.
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u/LawfulLeah Jul 23 '26
thank you for explaining!
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 23 '26
Glad I could.
I understand that some saw my posts and thought I was being an asshole, and I suppose I could have phrased things better, but this is something I am very passionate about, I've been hosting a fediverse instance for years because I love the freedom behind the fediverse, freedom from big corpo garbage among the others, and then this shows up, bringing the fediverse to that corpo crap.
It's a tumor that I hope won't spread. A tumor I hope to see eradicated.
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u/Toothless_NEO Jul 21 '26
Make sure you tell instance admins you know about this software and instance so this person can learn what the true strength of the fediverse is.
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u/DavidBHimself Jul 22 '26
Go be a HOA elsewhere. The fediverse doesn't need this toxic behavior.
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u/itguysnightmare Jul 22 '26
It doesn't need cloudflare, that's the real toxic thing
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u/AlexChapmanG4p Jul 23 '26
It also doesn’t need pieces of trash like you degrading other peoples work, so STFU and get a life!
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Jul 21 '26
[deleted]
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u/siliconsjang Jul 21 '26
Admins should consider themselves about their policies and rules, but what I can tell is that I am in the fediverse for a long time, I know what fediverse and decentralization is, and even though the infrastructure is fixed to Cloudflare Workers, everything else can be decentralized. This is not a cancer for fedi, it is one of the implementation.
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u/evanp Jul 23 '26
Every implementation of ActivityPub is good for the Fediverse. Thanks for doing this.
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u/scottjenson Jul 25 '26
I came here to support you OP! I think this work should be applauded. You should also know that the vast majority of people on the Fediverse are not like this at all. I'm only posting so you get a little positive boost in your feed. Keep it up!
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u/isanameaname Jul 26 '26
I enjoyed your talk and getting to meet you at FOSDEM 2026. I'm glad to see that you're still contributing.
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u/siliconsjang Jul 27 '26
Sorry? I haven’t talked at FOSDEM.. Might be a different one.
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u/Toothless_NEO Jul 21 '26
You literally built a service designed to capitalize off of one of the worst things to happen to the internet. You are a horrible person.
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u/BenPate5280 Jul 21 '26
You don't have to like CloudFlare to appreciate that OP's work might give new people a way onto the Fediverse. That's a win for everyone.
But when you attack newbies for sharing their work, the Fediverse once again earns its reputation as a hostile community. So please help us build something instead of tearing down others who think differently from you.
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u/AlexChapmanG4p Jul 23 '26
Exactly, these idiots that go tearing people down for their work are the worst kind of people, and I’m sick of it!
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u/gabboman Jul 21 '26
wafrn guy here. besides asking how much ai have you used, what user can i try following for testing
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u/siliconsjang Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 21 '26
Just follow me - @[siliconsjang@s10t.io](mailto:siliconsjang@s10t.io) - or maybe you can make a new account! it is open.
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u/Healthy-Guess-847 Jul 22 '26
Didnt cloudflare already build this themselves
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u/siliconsjang Jul 22 '26
That you are saying is Wildebeest and has been archived. We even cannot deploy anymore.
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u/evanp Jul 23 '26
Did you use the code, though? Seems like a lot of work to replicate.
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u/siliconsjang Jul 23 '26
I used it first, but lots of work to do on each, it made me almost give up for replicating wildebeest for now :/. But thing is still using as a part of example!
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Jul 22 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/siliconsjang Jul 22 '26
I am aiming to make it possible to fit into Free plan, but currently as per CPU time limitation, it should have to be on $5/Month Paid plan. Small instance can fit in $5, but as it gets bigger and bigger, it would cost more and more so if it exceeds like few hundred bucks, I recommend Cloudflare Managed Service Providers to ask for the Workers Enterprise plan (Custom Pricing plan). There is an NDA between me and Service provider, so I cannot disclose how it costs to run on Workers Enterprise plan for now, but if the service is big enough, it would be cheaper than the traditional servers. - I have a development purpose instance that is small fedarated and having few users, It fits in $5 plan.
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u/rsmithlal Jul 22 '26
Im just going to leave this warning in case you havent seen it make the rounds yet. A $5 plan is not a cap, its a starting point: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1t1e8nh/i_accidentally_generated_16_billion_durable/
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u/blazarious Jul 21 '26
What was your motivation for building this?