Used to use it buts it doesn't feel a good idea to change your vpn's default dns
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2026
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Privacy
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I use it for dns
Four 9s? How is anyone going to remember that?
Quad9 for Quadruple Nine
Zoom. (Or whoosh.)
it's 1 more after 8! Is there no mercy?
r/unexpectedfactorial and before you tell me: I know that this is not reddit. But 8! is a very large number and you probably didn't mean it like that.
IPv4:
- 9.9.9.9
- 149.112.112.112
IPv6:
- 2620:fe::fe
- 2620:fe::9
All from memory lol. I set it up a lot for people at home and businesses. That's for DNSSEC, filtered, non ECS.
Edit: you can also use https://dns.quad9.net/dns-query for mobile iirc.
A lot of fediverse instances for some weird reason use Cloudflare for captchas and espionage. I assume it's a sort of "genre-blind" offloading hardware work moment, if not something like being Class Traitors, because one of the big reasons people come to the Fediverse is precisely to escape the grip and decision power of giants like CF.
I guess if you have to defend against DDOS attacks going big is the only way.
No, that is why I created https://angieguardian.org/
But this only covers layer 7, doesn't it?
That is right. I tried to be transparent what is it NOT: https://angieguardian.org/guide/threat-model#what-guardian-does-not-defend-against
It's not.
Care to elaborate?
There's loads of DDoS alternatives.
It's a national security threat to give your httpa private keys to a US company. As a result, loads of alternatives exist for real DDoS attacks.
But also, almost any nonprofit social media site can just get away with a self hosted pow solution.
Ok, seems we have different ideas of what a real ddos attack is. I was thinking level 3 attacks.
...for what, specifically?
I think they mean Cloudflare captcha but I don’t know that Quad9 has something like that
Seems a little odd that the fediverse uses Cloudfare.
You need to be more descriptive, use in what regard? Both are capable DNS providers but as far as I’m aware, Cloudflare is also a domain registrar.
Also each instance of Lemmy is configured differently, perhaps Lemmy.zip uses cloudflare but that isn’t the case for every instance of Lemmy.
Yeah the mentioned capcha features of CloudFlare are a reverse proxy & caching CDN they provide; Quad9 is a DNS resolver only AFAIK.
Cloudflare also provides DNS resolving, but this isn’t something that a fediverse instance can put between itself and the user (that’s DNS hosting, which would probably be set up in connection with the aforementioned reverse proxy and CDN services)
Some folks are commenting here that they have had Quad9 issues with reliability; if true that’s a recent occurrence as I used them for years as a resolver without issue (been using my ISP as a DNS resolver for about 2 years now as I’ve moved and haven’t had the ability to set up my old servers in my new location. Soon, I hope!)
Quad9 is only a DNS server and I do use that for all of my servers as do many others. It doesn't provide domain registration, domain dns configuration, proxies, tunnels, etc, that Cloudflare does.
Cloudfare have many service a dns resolver is one of them. Quad9 only provide a dns resolver. When you visit a website and see Cloudfare thats has nothing to do with their dns resolver that is a complitly different service they provide to protect against ddos attacks.
I use it as my upstream DNS setup on my two piholes.
I used to use quad 9 but stopped using it after running into too many issues where it provided completely wrong results. Like not even outdated results just straight up wrong values that never existed, with both public websites as well as customer dns entries that I have managed for over a decade.
What, cloudflare is a registrar?
Registrar, nameserver, hosting provider, reverse proxy, authentication provider, they do lots of things now.
Yes but I wasn't using CloudFlare at all. The domains were registered with Tucows and only quad9 had incorrect DNS lookups.
That's odd, never had that issue and I've used it a long time. Even for my own domains changes propagate as quickly as any other DNS server I've used. Were your changes propagated to google, cloud flare, and the rest? Anyway, very weird since DNS propagation is pretty automated usually unless something is not propagating to any DNS server.
Everything else has correct results except for them. Some of the entries were years since being changed, then all of a sudden pointed elsewhere. Quick to troubleshoot but quite annoying.
I haven't used them since. Troubleshooting that kind of shit is not what I want to be spending my time on.
IDK but Cloudflare has an ODoH endpoint
I've never been able to chase it down, but Apple devices on my network always seem to have issues accessing some sites when using quad 9 for DNS. No problems with cloudflare, though. 🤷♂️
1.1.1.1 does no filtering. 9.9.9.9 does, similar to 1.1.1.2. To skip filtering use 9.9.9.10.
Thanks! I'll give that a shot. I didn't do much troubleshooting because other devices could access those sites just fine using 9.9.9.9, so I figured it was something weird in Apple's system.
Is Q9 as easy to use?
Yes, quad9 is a DNS provider, meaning the way to configure quad9 as your DNS provider is the same as configuring cloudflare but instead of 1.1.1.1 it's 9.9.9.9 (hence the name quad9)
edit: if you're using android or a browser (or really anything that uses DNS over https), the URLs are different, but you can find more info at https://quad9.net/
I don't think, that many people use Cloudflare. Why not Quad9? There are Vetter options