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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[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Yes, but then a comment mentioned the "hug of death" - high spike of requests resulting from a link being shared on some site, and OP asked why centralized sites were also creating problems

There was another post regarding previews some months/(knowing me probably a year) ago and personally I would go with federating previews. With a button for mods to refresh it from source for when something goes fucky

But social networks have been creating random bursts of requests, this way or another, even in the times of centralized socials