Of course it is. If a million websites are built with Flask then a bug in Flask affects all of them. If a million websites individually decide to use Cloudflare then Cloudflare affects them all.
But that doesn't mean Cloudflare is built in a centralised way (I assume it isn't), nor that there's something about the internet that is centralised around Cloudflare. Rather, people are choosing to include it as a dependency in their stack.
In your example Flask would be a single point of failure and could indeed be called decentralized. For example websites can individually patch their Flask installation and come back up one by one, without depending on anyone else (at least once Flask is fixed).
Here with Cloudflare, a single entity is responsible for the fix and will more or less fix the failure for every sites that uses it at the same time, by fixing it on their side. And website individually cannot do anything on their own.
So I would argue it makes sense to call that centralized, at least from a structural/operational perspective.
It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network.
From an operational perspective it's just a supplier like any other. Lots of suppliers are involved in a business's website. That doesn't make it centralised, though?
> It is at the very least a form of contraction of the network.
I think it's that at most. No one has to use them, as they accelerate / enhance open protocols. That is the least lock-in one could hope for, so they don't contract anything in a negative way.
Contrast with, say, Etsy/Shopify, who actively try to replace the open space with closed ones.
But every word can be relative to that? I don't see where we'd go with that. I do think it's how the word relates to the topic that's interesting, if that's what you mean, but I think we are trying to get at that (-:
Using a piece of software is not the same as using an online service.
If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask. The opposite of that would be many Flask-compatible yet unrelated other frameworks being used in parallel. A bug in Flask would not affect those not using that very codebase.
The centralisation people are speaking of here is the amount of people all putting their eggs in Cloudflare's basket.
> If all those websites are using Flask, that would be the equivalent of centralising on Flask
I agree on the equivalence between this and Cloudflare use, but not that this should be described as centralisation, which is a particularly potent word on the open web. Popularity isn't the same as centralisation. Each website could rewrite to remove Flask if they wanted.
Another example: if lots of people watch Squid Game, that doesn't indicate a centralisation of television programmes. No options are removed. People are just choosing to do a similar thing, but not in a way that centralises anything.
