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.

  • dropdrip@lemmy.mlEnglish
    262·
    9 hours ago

    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.

    • milbyte@lemmy.mlEnglish
      151·
      7 hours ago

      is there something that makes this different to 17 other proposals for a new internet or is it just a case of https://xkcd.com/927/

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      9·
      8 hours ago

      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.