mccThere is an interesting article titled "Please Don’t Share Our Links on Mastodon: Here’s Why!" about the startling load that Mastodon's mass-distributed link preview generation has on small independent webservers. But I cannot link it to you, because of a reason
Mark T. Tomczak@mcc Is it worse than getting Slashdotted?
@mark The problem is it's automated, because the servers all contact to ask for the link preview at the same time
@mcc Oof, that's an interesting challenge.
Also feels like a hole in either Mastodon's use of Fediverse or Fediverse itself. If node A is cloning posts to node B, it's already generated a preview and should clone that too!
DJ Sundog@mark @mcc the argument against forwarding a pre-fetched and rendered preview card is trust - can you trust every server in the fediverse to fetch and render a true and accurate representation of the preview card for every link? if you cannot, and you are not willing to accept the risk of forgery or misrepresentation, then you have to fetch and render at each node (so the argument goes - I am not a proponent of this argument).
@djsundog I just don't think that argument holds water, especially when the alternative is "every node independently queries the source machine."
I'm trusting peers to give an authoritative accounting of posts from users. Is trusting their preview computation a bridge too far?
I hope not, because consolidated social media doesn't have this problem from a technical standpoint, and that makes it a lot friendlier to web hosts than the Fediverse.
@mark I concur, and just made that argument in another post ha - https://toot-lab.reclaim.technology/@djsundog/112367639796872157 - I rambled a lot more than you did haha
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab (@[email protected])
Content warning: sundog's hot take on fedihugging