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.

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[–] ByteJunk@lemmy.world 43 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

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....

[–] Doom@lemmy.world 10 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] dreamkeeper@lemmy.world 20 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

It's just bad design. What happens when/if the fediverse scales up to many more instances?

[–] WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 hour ago

It better fucking not

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 10 points 9 hours ago

Thing is, Fediverse is not a product

[–] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

It’s obviously bad enough that major news orgs are blocking it.

[–] CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world 5 points 8 hours ago

Is that really why they’re blocking it I wonder…