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.
Is there a reason why the publishing instance is not downloading the preview image, and then submits it with the post to the other instances? This way they would not have to fetch it themselves.
Yeah, thats how it should be: one download, everyone else downloads from that server, not the original source.
Seems abusable though
It is, but that’s what defederation is for: If there are instances that are being sketchy, they are supposed to get cut off from the rest of the Fediverse.
If one instance doesn’t trust another, they shouldn’t federate in the first place.
Exactly
Add metadata with a checksum of the og one with signature and let each client check that up.
If it’s a signed checksum then maybe. But if the og instance is doing the abusing then it won’t help.
Yeah there must be some trust indeed of the og instance. A scoring system could help with that.
Or … Or we could stagger the requests of the different instances so that they don’t overload the linked site. Why reinvent the wheel?
Eventually that leaves the load to the source event if it’s differed. And the load would still grow along the growth of the fediverse. So this would likely be pushing the issue to tomorrow. Signing content checksum isn’t exactly like reinventing a wheel, it’s something done in many contexts. And it removes the load from the source entirely.