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.
Sorry, I think I’m just blind. I tried a non piefed.social post earlier today and didn’t see it in the JSON, but checking a piefed.social post now, the property is there. So either I just didn’t see it the first time around, or the instance I tried it with wasn’t the best example to use.
Anyway, deleted my comment. But then OP’s post confuses me again, because there really shouldn’t be a DDoS happening toward the small site. The instance hosting the thumbnail sure, but not the site that’s being linked to.