Cloudflare released Drop today. It’s a simple way of creating a static website by “dropping” your HTML and CSS files into a folder and seeing it go live instantly.
Interesting and fun idea, but it’s the modern equivalent of build a blog in 15 minutes. Impressive, but ultimately not much use to anyone in its current form. It’s purely a marketing exercise (working!), and probably generated by the summer interns and Claude. As a founder of a blogging platform, I shouldn’t be quaking in my Vejas just yet.
What’s not fun about it are the terms and conditions:
By submitting, posting, or publishing your content, suggestions, enhancement requests, recommendations, feedback, information, data, or comments (“Content”) to any Website or Online Service, you are granting Cloudflare a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free right and license (with the right to sublicense) to use, incorporate, exploit, display, perform, reproduce, distribute, and prepare derivative works of your Content.
Rather OTT don’t you think? I’m hoping it’s just because they have a battlement of lawyers who demanded this sort of nonsense (see also: Meta), but as a fan (yes, they do amazing things!) and a paying Cloudflare customer, it certainly erodes trust.
A lot of the indie blogging community are privacy-conscious and anti-big tech, so this sort of nonsense will tar Cloudflare (good Internet citizens that they are, imo), and perhaps by association the likes of Pagecord and Bear blog who use their services. It’s a shame, but it is what it is. I’m not beholden to Cloudflare, but they make my life easier and I don’t have the headspace to consider a migration elsewhere unless there’s a monumental reason to do so.
I’m hoping this negativity gets picked up and commented on by Cloudflare themselves (it’s hot on Hacker News today). I’m interested in their take. As custodians of a huge part of internet infrastructure, they need us to have conviction in their actions, but for me this has been a small but noticeable depletion in the trust battery.