From what I understand, Cloudflare can block some DDoS attacks, but not all of them.
The attacks on Lemmy have to do with poorly optimized SQL requests; these are requests that shouldn’t take long to execute, but do due to some oversight. By spamming these requests, the attackers can bring Lemmy on it’s knees.
Actually, wouldn’t this attack better be categorized as a DoS attack ? What’s so distributed about it ?