Although I take the article’s claims around intentionally propping up the DDoS landscape with a heavy grain of salt, the fact remains that anti-DDoS services can be critical for sites on the modern-day internet, and that our reliance on them is a weakness which certainly has been exploited before and will be exploited again to silence disfavored speech.
Note: we do use CloudFlare for our lemmy as well!
Federation can be another mitigation against denial of service attacks. When our Lemmy server went down, I was still able to read our history of posts and comments via a federated server.