if you're trying to build a chatroom then any chat software goes but if you're trying to build a community you should probably use something searchable and indexed, like real community software
also i find it laughable that users must already be on such platform, by your logic all communities should be mailing lists
thanks for saying this! i really don't want to victim blame itsfoss for getting traffic spikes but if you cant handle ~20MB in one minute (~400kbps) of traffic you're doing something really really wrong and you really should look into it, especially if you want to distribute content. crying "dont share our links on mastodon" also sounds like hunting windmills, block the mastodon UA and be done with it, or stop putting images in your link previews for mastodon, or drop link previews completely. a "100 mb DDOS" is laughable at best, nice amplification calculation but that's still 100 megs