@coffeegeek That totally makes sense. I may have a solution to make Cloudflare only cache requests from Mastodon instances while still letting the humans see the local dynamic content.

It's a little tricky to explain in a toot – I’d probably need to run a quick test. Would it be useful to you if I tried it out and wrote it up for your web dev to consider?

@coffeegeek And digging deeper, I see a Cache-Control header set max-age=0, which is effectively disabling caching. I'm not sure if that's your origin server or cloudflare, but it may not be helping.

@coffeegeek Just doing some reading – and I'm sure you're sick of trying things: If you enable tiered caching with Cloudflare, that may help you avoid the dog-pile effect which you're seeing.

@coffeegeek I feel your pain. It's a confluence of two of the downsides of using a federated open standard.

I'm sure you've had plenty of offers of help, but if you're interested I'll add mine to the list.