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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[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 10 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I don't really get it. The image is federated, there's no need for instances to refetch it. Just checked out some posts and indeed it's there, in the image property. With the URL pointing to the Lemmy instance.

So if this is actually an issue, that's just bad programming and needs to be fixed.

~~Edit: didn't notice OP uses Piefed. Unlike Lemmy and Mbin, it seems like Piefed doesn't federate it.~~

Edit: actually I'm blind, Piefed does federate it too, sorry piefed

[–] artyom@piefed.social -2 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

The image is not federated.

[–] Pamasich@kbin.earth 8 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I just took this random post from my frontpage: https://sh.itjust.works/post/68605733 and made a manual request for the federated JSON-LD.

{
  "@context": [
    "https://join-lemmy.org/context.json",
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams"
  ],
  "type": "Page",
  "id": "https://sh.itjust.works/post/68605733",
  "attributedTo": "https://sh.itjust.works/u/derrickoswald",
  "to": [
    "https://lemmy.world/c/technology",
    "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#Public"
  ],
  "name": "Stratospheric airship flew from US to Japan and back",
  "cc": [],
  "content": "<p>It seems with an unmanned airship they should be using hydrogen for the ~8% increased payload capacity.</p>\n",
  "mediaType": "text/html",
  "source": {
    "content": "It seems with an unmanned airship they should be using hydrogen for the ~8% increased payload capacity.",
    "mediaType": "text/markdown"
  },
  "attachment": [
    {
      "href": "https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/10/trans-pacific-journey-tested-stratospheric-cell-tower-concept-in-japan/",
      "mediaType": "text/html; charset=utf-8",
      "type": "Link"
    }
  ],
  "image": {
    "type": "Image",
    "url": "https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/df608ab3-b644-489d-b217-9224aa09e203.jpeg"
  },
  "sensitive": false,
  "published": "2026-10-19T20:16:37.383385Z",
  "language": {
    "identifier": "en",
    "name": "English"
  },
  "audience": "https://lemmy.world/c/technology",
  "tag": [
    {
      "href": "https://sh.itjust.works/post/68605733",
      "name": "#technology",
      "type": "Hashtag"
    }
  ]
}

Notice the

"image": {
    "type": "Image",
    "url": "https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/df608ab3-b644-489d-b217-9224aa09e203.jpeg"
  }

Yes the image itself isn't sent over (iirc they never are?), but it's stored on sh.itjust.works. Other instances grab it from there, not the website the post links to.

I did notice just now though that some Lemmy instances seem to just proxy the image through their servers, which I assume is to avoid CORS. But that's an instance choice, not a general fediverse issue.

Mbin does the same as Lemmy, but it also includes the image in the attachment property. Probably for compatibility with some other platform.

~~One thing I didn't notice before was that you're using Piefed. That's the one software I didn't check before writing my previous comment. It does seem like Piefed is the outlier here. I tried a post from piefed.ca and the image is nowhere to be seen. The image property is not present, it's not in the attachment array, and I can't see any other property that contains it.~~

Edit: A piefed.social post I just tried did have an image, so I assume I'm just blind.

[–] artyom@piefed.social 0 points 15 hours ago

Rimu posted a parent comment elsewhere regarding PieFed and Lemmy.

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Are you sure? In your post you're talking about fetching an image for a link preview, not an image post.

Usually, when I see an image post, the source is actually the pictrs of the source instance, so in that case I think it is federated.

[–] artyom@piefed.social -2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

No one was talking about an image post...

[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

I figured a post with a link with preview image wouldn't be the same in terms of event as an image post. Turns out it pretty much is, but also, I checked a few posts and cross-posts across instances, all of them have an image url of the original instance, not the one I'm viewing on. So if they are individually fetching this image, they're not using it.

Edit: I was wrong, two of the crossposts just didn't respond to the request for activity, so I was looking at the wrong response data

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

the image should be federated

[–] artyom@piefed.social -1 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (1 children)

Did I say "shouldn't be"? Could have sworn i said "is"...

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

The image isn't federated, but [I believe] it should be.

But I am already thinking it shouldn't be because of hosting concerns.