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.
This is no different from how it is already, though. If a user posts a CSAM link, your server immediately visits that link to scrape it, and you suddenly have that content on your server.
Of course, if you have a blocklist of forbidden sites, then your server will know not to scrape that site. And the same thing applies if we allow servers to send pre-scraped metadata. If the incoming message is for a blocked URL, just drop the message and don’t save any part of it.
The only new threat here is for a malicious server operator to modify outgoing messages to include CSAM metadata on a harmless link. However, that possibility already exists with any other content posted on the fediverse. If a malicious server is modifying its own outgoing messages, the only fix is to defederate from it.
Allowing servers to forward pre-scraped metadata to other servers does not introduce any new threats that do not already exist.
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