I'm more of a Dungeon guy myself, but sometimes Rampart is fine.
darius
Cloudflare can protect against DDOS. In this instance the people are ddosing the server, although not intentionally. There are just a lot of people trying to open the site. So it's not malicious but still an "attack", which cloudflare's service mitigates. In reddit it was called the "reddit hug of death", when small sites kneeled down because a post got popular with their links in it.
And yes, there are, the second largest is fedia.io You can find more here:
Yepp, it works surprisingly well. I assume one of the similar communities will eventually "win" on one of the instances, like with similar subreddits over time. Also some instances will go full specific, like nature or movies or gaming etc. See the growth of lemmynsfw already, lol.
I'm really liking it a lot. I wasn't too amused by Mastodon either, but as you say: for link aggregation, for specific communities, for discussing topics (and not being about people, but about topics) this is a perfect match.
And I see both of your replies on lemmy, in the Jerboa app. What a time to be alive!