So we need people to just mass post links to bad websites, is what you're saying.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2026
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i'm feeling less ambivalent about those reddit repost bots for a moment
Is this the same thing as the “Reddit hug of death”?
Similar, except those are caused by users visiting a link, whereas the Fediverse issue is federated servers gathering info before users even see a link.
Or being slashdotted.
Or the Digg Effect
Thanks for bringing this up. I think in general we need to work on optimisation of Activitypub and Threadiverse implementations of it.
Either publishing server should serve the metadata - although it would be prone to bad actors, so a refetch in the next 0-180 seconds would be appropriate. Or just add a random 0-60 second delay before fetching the data.
Is there a reason why the publishing instance is not downloading the preview image, and then submits it with the post to the other instances? This way they would not have to fetch it themselves.
Yeah, thats how it should be: one download, everyone else downloads from that server, not the original source.
Seems abusable though
It is, but that's what defederation is for: If there are instances that are being sketchy, they are supposed to get cut off from the rest of the Fediverse.
Seems abusable though
If one instance doesn't trust another, they shouldn't federate in the first place.
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So linking my own website here is a bad idea? Glad I haven't done that yet.
I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It's no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.
Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don't honour robots.txt (or aren't yet listed).
that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).
Throw'em in the tar pit.
that don’t honour robots.txt
That's essentially all of them in my experience.
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.
Oh wow GNUNet I havent heard of that in a while. How is it nowadays?
Or i2p.
is there something that makes this different to 17 other proposals for a new internet or is it just a case of
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.
GNUnet provides privacy-by design
Money doesn't want us to have privacy.
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I mean, just how many instances are gonna ping the URL? Several hundred, low thousands at worst?
Unless it happens to be some very large media content or a dynamic page with no caching, I'd think the automated federation hits shouldn't be too bad.
The influx of users that might come after a viral post though, that's rough....
Yeah but we can't say we want to encourage people to have/build/share independent smaller websites then beat them up when they are linked. That's a huge mismatch of morality. Either we want to encourage people off the big platforms and should make it easier for the little guys or we are blowing magic smoke.
It's just bad design. What happens when/if the fediverse scales up to many more instances?
It better fucking not
I liked writing efficient code but every place I worked didn't care at all about it. All they wanted was a finished feature and a kanban note moved to finished.
Thing is, Fediverse is not a product
It’s obviously bad enough that major news orgs are blocking it.
Is that really why they’re blocking it I wonder…
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.
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