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.

  • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    11 hours ago

    Lots of normal traffic is instant. Throttling must be handled by for in this instance NPR or its providers routers because even if hammering is a bad practice, we are participating in why it happens at all if we just build structures to mitigate it.

    Yes that’s why I included a solution, and explained explicitly that it can be solved but only temporarily

    • artyom@piefed.socialOP
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      10 hours ago

      Lots of normal traffic is instant

      Not instant from a thousand different servers. That’s what a botnet looks like. AKA DDOS. That’s why I explained that. Why are you acting like you don’t understand this?

      Throttling must be handled by for in this instance NPR

      No. It mustn’t. AP servers can fix it on their end.

      Yes that’s why I included a solution

      Which you then went on to explain wasn’t a solution…?

      • KeenFlame@feddit.nu
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        6
        ·
        9 hours ago

        You may suffer from irritation of your ego my friend. Know that you are not your ideas or projects, you are more than that. I feel like all of your questions were previously answered sorry.

        • artyom@piefed.socialOP
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          9 hours ago

          You may suffer from the dumbs, my friend. My questions were answered. Before you showed up.