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FYI to anyone who recently set up a server for #fediverse stuff (like #kbin or #lemmy for the #redditmigration) and is just now having to learn how to set up a content cache in front of it to keep from paying a million dollar hosting bill for something that you thought would just be a nice hobby, you need to make sure of some things:

– Some key files need to be reachable without going through things like cloudflare’s bot detection because they are literally for bots! This includes stuff like `/robots.txt` but also everything under `/.well-known` (and especially `/.well-known/webfinger`).

– You NEED to make sure your cache “varies” content by the `Accept` header, which makes it so that if someone tries to friend you at `https://your.lemmy.example/u/whoever` from their mastodon server (or probably even from a different lemmy/kbin server), their server will be able to fetch the activitypub document for your user! Otherwise, they’ll get a cached copy of the html web page! I dunno how you do this with cloudflare, but with most reverse proxies you run yourself the thing you want is a setting for “vary” which will let you say what headers change the response type.

The next couple of days are probably going to be rough, but doing these things will make things a little better and a lot less confusing for your new users!

—@megmac