As you noticed, I had to temporarily enable DDoS protection. Someone is trying quite effectively to distract me from my activities ;p Unfortunately, this may cause some issues with the federation. I will try to cut off the traffic as soon as possible and return to normal operation. Thank you for all your support and patience! :)
The way I have it, Mastodon works like Twitter. Kbin, Lemmy, etc. work like reddit, as a way to gather together tons of individual forums/subforums.
Only, because they all use the same networking protocol, they’re all compatible with each other. So imagine being able to use your reddit account to follow/respond to a tweet. The whole thing comes off as so much chaos to the uninitiated, and I’m kind of liking it