spy on all the traffic

That’s…not how things work. Everyone has their philosophical opinions so I won’t attempt to argue the point, but if you want to handle scale and distribution, you’re going to have to start thinking differently, otherwise you’re going to fail when load starts to really increase.

You could configure something like a Cloudflare worker to throw up a page directing users elsewhere whenever healthchecks failed.

Think about everything you hate about Reddit—the kids, the trolls, the spam—and be thankful Lemmy requires a little more effort.

This is the way Reddit used to be when it first came out.