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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[–] dropdrip@lemmy.ml 33 points 14 hours ago (5 children)

It's almost like the software that powers the internet was designed for a different time and is only still used because there's monied interest in keeping it around. We need GNUnet.

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 2 points 4 hours ago

Oh wow GNUNet I havent heard of that in a while. How is it nowadays?

[–] 0x0@lemmy.zip 4 points 8 hours ago

Or i2p.

[–] milbyte11@lemmy.ml 17 points 12 hours ago

is there something that makes this different to 17 other proposals for a new internet or is it just a case of

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 12 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

GNUnet helps building a new Internet

GNUnet is a network protocol stack for building secure, distributed, and privacy-preserving applications.

With strong roots in academic research, our goal is to replace the old insecure Internet protocol stack.

GNUnet provides privacy-by design

It provides [improving addressing, routing, naming and content distribution](https://www.w3.org/2014/strint/papers/65.pdf) in a technically robust manner - as opposed to ad-hoc designs in place today.

[–] TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world 15 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

GNUnet provides privacy-by design

Money doesn't want us to have privacy.

[–] tachikoma@lemmy.today 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

Forget the money. RevolutionOS!

[–] Duckling5746@lemmy.today 4 points 12 hours ago

Now this is interesting. Thanks for sharing