Love Lemmy and want to see it grow, and it might be able to slow down a poorly-made site, but I doubt we have the raw clicks to cause an issue on properly-maintained websites.
Not even Reddit can hug properly hosted websites anymore. Our server architecture is quite a bit more robust and flexible now than it was even just 5 or 6 years ago.
have the raw clicks to cause an issue on properly-maintained websites.
That's been true of Reddit forever now as well, I only ever remember the Hug of Death actually affecting only small time websites that probably had maybe like 3 people running it.
Links to anything else was usually just fine, barring a few exceptions because even the big boys make fuck ups too
But nowadays the bar to "properly maintained" is lower with more mature, robust and easier to use tooling
With all the devs and anarchists on Lemmy, we don't necessarily need huge numbers to take down a website. Just 1 determined individual who knows their way around a botnet. 😌
Except they were corralled off the cliff to their doom by an overzealous documentary producer. Disney murdered a bunch of rodents to make their nature movie more interesting. Lemmings don't actually follow each other off of cliffs.
We're like the adorable little creatures in the game Lemmings (see my instance name), so we all cry "Let's go!" when we hit up a web site, and then cry out "Oh, no!" and explode when the that final click blows up the website.
(You'll have to be familiar with the game to get what I'm talking about.)
Was just gonna say. I'm old enough to remember when it was the Slashdot effect. And you put links to the Coral Cache of the website as a nice way to guard against slashdotting.
Digg is dead. Its main page is nothing but a bunch of zero effort AI-Slop listicles. I had to actually LOOK for any mention of anything relevant actually going on there, and when I DID finally see a news story about The Claims Adjuster allegedly being caught, there was like ... ONE comment. A based comment, admittedly: "Hero." - but still only one comment.