“If Marginalia Search didn’t use Cloudflare, it couldn’t serve traffic.”
Marginalia runs on a souped-up PC on residential broadband. Bots hit it with 15 queries a second from hundreds of thousands of IPs, so rate limiting does nothing. The only way to stay up is to hide behind Cloudflare. The bots killed the forums, and now they push every independent site into the arms of one gatekeeper.