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.

@berkes @sneak don't show preview until a user clicks, or stick the previews into the fedi post, or don't use previews at all because who cares, it's not worth literally DDoSing everyone else over

@sir @berkes @sneak I like how Signal handles this: when you send a link, Signal can generate a link preview on the sender's device and attach it to the message, so recipients get the preview without sending a request to the website.

This is not an endorsement of Signal as a whole, just praise for one of its features.

@Seirdy @berkes @sir

if a website can't handle a set of approximately simultaneous requests from all of the AP servers in the world, that website sucks and should go down. that's only like what, 500-1000 hits?

@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.

[1] https://fediverse.network/mastodon

@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.