Aggressive caching for a Mastodon reverse proxy: what to cache, what to never cache, and why content negotiation will eventually betray you

Author details how to cache Mastodon with nginx on FreeBSD while handling content negotiation correctly, covering cache keys for HTML/ActivityPub/JSON variants, bypass rules for private traffic, and TTL strategies for assets, media, and dynamic pages. The guide includes production-tested configurations for thundering-herd protection, failover, and logging to verify cache behavior.