Yeah the servers are getting hammered with all of the refugees. I've seen the numbers and it's just astounding. I wonder if the creators of Mastodon ever imagined this many people joining and using the service.
The federated nature of Mastodon CAN handle the enormous amount of traffic if it is distributed across the several servers. The problem with that is, people aren't flooding ALL the servers, they're only flooding the ones with the highest number of people in them, because that's the logical thing to do as a user.
Mastodon itself and all of its supporters will say over and over again that the server you join doesn't matter, that you can search and follow and talk to people across servers seamlessly - and that's true, but it's also not intuitive at all - like, it doesn't make sense to a newbie. If it doesn't matter "which server" you join, why are there even different servers? Why are most of the servers divided into interest categories? If I'm an artist AND I sometimes like to talk about climate change, which server to I join - the art one, the climate justice one? Neither? If I join Mastodon.art, does that mean I can't make posts about climate change or if I make too many they'll complain?
These things all are, I think, sufficiently explained - but they DO have to be explained to people, hence the whole meme about how listening to someone explain Mastodon is like listening to Geordi LaForge explain how he's going to solve the A-plot.
