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.

  • ByteJunk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    461·
    22 hours ago

    I mean, just how many instances are gonna ping the URL? Several hundred, low thousands at worst?

    Unless it happens to be some very large media content or a dynamic page with no caching, I’d think the automated federation hits shouldn’t be too bad.

    The influx of users that might come after a viral post though, that’s rough…

    • Doom@lemmy.worldEnglish
      10·
      15 hours ago

      Yeah but we can’t say we want to encourage people to have/build/share independent smaller websites then beat them up when they are linked. That’s a huge mismatch of morality. Either we want to encourage people off the big platforms and should make it easier for the little guys or we are blowing magic smoke.

    • dreamkeeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      221·
      19 hours ago

      It’s just bad design. What happens when/if the fediverse scales up to many more instances?