With forewarning about a huge influx of users, you know Lemmy.ml will go down. Even if people go to https://join-lemmy.org/instances and disperse among the great instances there, the servers will go down.
Ruqqus had this issue too. Every time there was a mass exodus from Reddit, Ruqqus would go down, and hardly reap the rewards.
Even if it’s not sustainable, just for one month, I’d like to see Lemmy.ml drastically boost their server power. If we can raise money as a community, what kind of server could we get for 100$? 500$? 1,000$?
You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.
Then cloudflare would be able to spy on all the traffic so thats not an option.
That’s…not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won’t attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you’re going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you’re going to fail when load starts to really increase.
Cloudflare does have the ability to spy on traffic though, they hold SSL keys.
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A better option for a simple usecase like that is using something from your DNS provider. Depending on who you use they may have a health check service that has no access to user data that can simply ping a URL, and if it fails hard enough, start redirecting traffic to join-lemmy.org
I think Constellix has it, though I’m not necessarily recommending them specifically
You could run an interstitial proxy yourself with a little health checking. The server itself doesn’t die, just the webapp/db. nginx could be stuck on there (if it’s not already there) with a temp redirect if the site is timing out.
How about https://deflect.ca/ they could still spy but probably less bad?