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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[–] Ghoelian@piefed.social 4 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 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