I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

  • panos@catodon.rocksEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    But what happens when a link target changes? For example, I’ve seen news articles change as the author gets new information. Might be an edge case, but a solution like this would always show the preview at the time of the initial post.

    • artyom@piefed.socialOPEnglish
      11·
      10 hours ago

      Is that normally updated? If so, how often are they polling for changes?

    • HubertManne@piefed.socialEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      is this a bad thing though. like if im the poster I don’t necessarily want the content to change compared to what I saw and was excited about so came to tell people about.