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 are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 12 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

A slight delay would be perfectly sufficient.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 2 points 23 hours ago (3 children)

If they're all delayed the same it would have the same effect. In order to prevent that it would require some form of coordination amongst them. And even then would have the same complaint about missing link previews. Better than nothing but not really a "solution", per se.

[–] anotherandrew@lemmy.mixdown.ca 36 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Random back off is an ancient and very well understood algorithm. This is not exactly rocket science.

[–] OwOarchist@pawb.social 10 points 22 hours ago

If they’re all delayed the same it would have the same effect. In order to prevent that it would require some form of coordination amongst them.

A delay randomized within a certain range could accomplish this without needing coordination.

[–] tyler@programming.dev 10 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Random numbers exist.

[–] jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 3 points 22 hours ago

wait 3 //randomlydecidedby fair dice roll