I’m an instance admin and see heaps of the same stuff being posted. Pretty sure it’s one lonely troll not lots of people. Even in this thread, it’s all one user account not lots of different people, but we see the same stuff posted across lots of brand new accounts in a very similar way.
Privacy/security: Cloudflare terminates HTTPS, which means they decrypt your data on their side (e.g. browser to cloudflare section) then re-encrypt for the second part (cloudflare to server). They can therefore read your traffic, including passwords. Depending on your threat model, this might be a concern or it might not. A counterpoint is that Cloudflare helps protect your service from bad actors, so it could be seen to increase security.
Cloudflare is centralised. The sidebar of this community states “A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don’t control.”, and Cloudflare is for sure a service you don’t control, and arguably you’re locked into it if you can’t access your stuff without it. Some people think Coudflare goes against the ethos of self-hosting.
With that said, you’ll find several large lemmy instances (and many small ones) use cloudflare. While you’ll easily find people against its use, you’ll find many more people in the self-hosted community using it because it’s (typically) free and it works. If you want to use it, and you’re ok with the above, then go ahead.
If this is how Lemmy is ran then I will need to find another community
Lemmy is not ran in any particular way.
That’s one community one one instance. On most instances, anyone can create a community and become the god of what is allowed there. That doesn’t mean it’s representative of the rest of that instance. But even if it is, you can post to other communities on other instances.
There is one mod on one community doing something dodgy (or just got a report about it being antisemitic and assumed they were right - after all, there’s no training course for being a lemmy mod). This is certainly not the way “lemmy is ran” and thinking lemmy is run in any particular way is missing the core aspect of what lemmy is.
We very often see the same username created across many instances, it’s very easy to do and Lemmy has no protections against it. Plus, there are no protections against creating multiple accounts to upvote your own posts (don’t get any ideas 😆). IP blocks wouldn’t work as instances are entirely independent, so there is no sharing of IP info across different instances.
Currently there is at least some level of coordination across instances, though, such as Lemmy.world’s Defense HQ, where instance admins can share info about spammers/trolls so we don’t have to wait for a report from one of our own users. There’s also Fediseer, but this protects against spam instances not spam accounts on mainstream instances.