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.
You’re talking about 2 different kinds of blocking here. NPR can’t block a URL, that concept doesn’t really exist at this level. They could block ip addresses, or user agents as you mentioned.
A workplace can’t block by user agent (at least not on any website using TLS), as this header is not readable by any intermediary devices.
I wasn’t talking about NPR, I was talking about their employer…
You mentioned both in the same comment…
I’m just saying, their employer can’t block like NPR does, because they are fundamentally different things. The one is a server receiving a request, the other is a firewall seeing encrypted packets.
Edit: the other could also be a DNS resolver that just does not resolve certain domains.