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.
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…
It’s just bad design. What happens when/if the fediverse scales up to many more instances?
I liked writing efficient code but every place I worked didn’t care at all about it. All they wanted was a finished feature and a kanban note moved to finished.
Thing is, Fediverse is not a product
The many pointless presentations I’ve given about tech debt and code quality. Argued for redesigning poorly designed systems. They don’t care. Just churn out more features to cross off the list, and why do those features take so long?
Yeah I think a lot of us share this experience. All the stuff we are tought in our educations about clean code and architecture… Once we come out and work, management don’t want that stuff if it takes extra time. They want features shipped as soon as possible, and every meeting is about “how fast can you do this feature”.
And now of course embracing AI since it’s so fast. When things break, engineers will have to figure out the problem when the entire system is down, not management. :)
And then they can have a post mortem where they say that engineering must have better routines…lol.
I no longer work in tech but I quit at the top I think, before Ai was a requirement. And when consulting salaries was still good. Now they are awful.
No, you just worked at bad places
Sure, but there are a lot of bad places. I bet the majority of engineers work in bad places like this.
I think so. I’ve worked at bad, average and good places, but the bad places tend to be larger and far less efficient, so they have to hire more engineers to make up for the inefficiency.
And they don’t necessarily pay well either. They see engineers as powerless cogs who have to do what they’re told, so they get paid like that too. And then they complain they can’t find seniors.
Pretty much. The engineering teams ive worked in had maybe one actually good guy, and the rest were awful engineers. I’m not saying I’m super good but I grew up with Linux and networks at home, and was programming from a young age. So im pretty decent. But most engineers had no experience with computers and was in it for the money, obviously.
Yeah, but it’s also dependent entirely on if you chase money or actually want to become a good engineer because it is fun.
It better fucking not
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.
It’s obviously bad enough that major news orgs are blocking it.
Is that really why they’re blocking it I wonder…