@kev Looks like it worked!

@kev Well done, congrats :)

@kev you could do the random posts with caching if you made it a little less random, for example the set of posts displayed lasts an hour (I usually do this by modding the post id numbers with the current time stamp, set to the period I want it to refresh at, here hourly)
Although it working might vary with your actual backend implementation, I guess

@kev Interesting analysis and ultimate resolution.

'There was a number of people who commented on Mastodon saying that this is a simple problem to fix on the server side. I don't think that's fair'.

I agree with you 100%. You can't ask and encourage folk to run a Mastodon instance and miraculously expect that detailed level of server/admin/network knowledge.

@kev In your blog post you say “someone like me, who isn't a sysadmin”. I’ve got news for you. If you can do the things you do and do them successfully, you’re a sysadmin. Nice work. You might be a reluctant sysadmin or an unenthusiastic sysadmin, but you’re doing the work and doing it well. Thanks for sharing the journey to solving that problem.

@kev "simple" is the nastiest thing anyone can say to you about any technical problem.

@kev Yep, a caching plugin fixes it as you discovered. I'm not familiar with your CMS but for the more common case of Wordpress, installing WP Super Cache (or similar) fixes the problem at a stroke.

@kev Great work, and congratulations! You're smarter than It'sFoss

@kev Congrats! Thanks for sharing the solution and the process.

@kev nice, glad you figure it out.

@kev nice write up, thanks for sharing the journey. Does this effectively mean that your site is a static site except there dashboard/control panel portions? Or just that each post page is "static" (due to cache) and the main page is still generated on each request (like it will fall over if you shared the top level link)?