So are we just not going to deal with Mastodon's DDoSing links problem
@sir i don't think it's a problem. the web is large now and webservers need to account for that, unless there's some specific bug that's causing things to get hit more than there are eyeballs
@sneak every time you post a link on mastodon, every instance it gets federated to will automatically fetch it to generate a link preview
@sir @sneak what would be the solution?
A centralised proxy? Previews fetched from their origin (and DDossing that)? Some distribution and mirrorring; and then how to avoid poisoning?
Honestly curious.
What about a separate p2p 'linkpreview' network? Such a project could even leverage some 'reward' system, not unlike filecoin, dat or storj. Mastodon, matrix, signal etc could then fetch previews there, instead of all implementing their own.
This is not an endorsement of Signal as a whole, just praise for one of its features.
@sneak Aside from the "snobbism" (not all can afford to have tuned servers/ CMSes, some may want to use a Pi or some spare hardware), this doesn't scale.
So, indeed: Today it might not be a problem at all.
But AP aims to grow and even manages to do so. Grow x4 and the mastodon side of the fediverse alone, hits a website potentially 10108 times[1] for each link.
My static-sites won't blink an eye. But your average shared-wordpress or Rails mudball will go down.
@berkes a rails or shared wordpress will go down if a link to it is shared on social media too, for the same reason. the web is big now and servers need to serve. nothing is broken here.
@sneak there's a difference between a. "sharing a link on twitter" that will cause 1 server to fetch a preview, and b."the fediverse" that causes 2.4k servers to fetch a preview *within a minute*.
And c. N visitors over the next hours.
More important, IMO is the message you want to send: do we encourage decentralisation? selfhosting, many small nodes, etc.?
Or do we say "if you post a link to the fediverse, there is a requirement that your server can handle 2k hits within a minute."
@berkes it won't exclude it from being shared on the fediverse. i would be extremely surprised if the links don't get posted even if preview generation fails. there is no problem here
@sneak I've owned and/or founded three webhosting companies. Please believe me when I say that your requirement will exclude over half of the "long tail" of the internet. If not more. Too many websites are on a constant brink of breakdown. From webshops that can handle 5 orders a week, but never more to blogs that crash at anything over 1rps.
I cherish that web. I certainly don't want to "exclude it" from being shared on fediverse. Not now, and not when the fediverse grows 4, 10, or 100x.