consider that caching happens at thousands of levels on the internet. every centralized site has its content replicated many many times in geo local caches, proxies and even local browsers. caching is a very core concept for the internet. others often bash AP because it replicates a lot, but that’s kind of like explicit caching: if the whole fediverse network fetched a post from it source, millions of requests would beat small servers down constantly. big servers cache the content they intend to distribute and handle the traffic spike instead of the small instance. small instances on their hand dont need to replicate as much and can rely more on bigger instances, maybe cleaning their cached content often and refetching when necessary. replication is a feature, not a design flaw!
thanks for saying this! i really don’t want to victim blame itsfoss for getting traffic spikes but if you cant handle ~20MB in one minute (~400kbps) of traffic you’re doing something really really wrong and you really should look into it, especially if you want to distribute content. crying “dont share our links on mastodon” also sounds like hunting windmills, block the mastodon UA and be done with it, or stop putting images in your link previews for mastodon, or drop link previews completely. a “100 mb DDOS” is laughable at best, nice amplification calculation but that’s still 100 megs