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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[–] wjs018@piefed.wjs018.xyz 195 points 21 hours ago (26 children)

There are two proposed solutions I have seen. I do not claim that this is exhaustive, just only limited to the proposals that I have stumbled across.

FASP - Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider

The idea that mastodon has is to have a third-party service that does something like generate a link preview once and then share that to fediverse instances that need it. They have a whole spec they wrote up about these kinds of services that can be run to help out fediverse instances with different things like this, search, or discoverability. They call these FASPs - the repo with the spec is here.

I don't yet know of any FASP that is live and running, so it is kind of a paper spec at the moment. I don't do too much on the microblogging side of the fediverse though, so I very well could be wrong.

Federate link metadata and the post at the same time

This comes from an issue on PieFed's repo. It is basically just an idea at this point, but it is a pretty basic one; have the originating instance fetch the link preview information and simply federate it out alongside the post itself.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

But what happens when a link target changes? For example, I've seen news articles change as the author gets new information. Might be an edge case, but a solution like this would always show the preview at the time of the initial post.

[–] HubertManne@piefed.social 1 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

is this a bad thing though. like if im the poster I don't necessarily want the content to change compared to what I saw and was excited about so came to tell people about.

[–] panos@catodon.rocks 1 points 7 hours ago

yeah, you're not wrong...

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