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!
Greg@mark @mcc you cannot (by default) trust the link preview provided by your peer, as they may alter it without your knowledge. yes, the destination site itself may alter output based on requester, but that's a different problem than the "malicious relay" one.
there are some solutions - a trust system where you take some servers' previews as gospel, or maybe the preview comes with a hash that HTTP HEAD can be used to verify (much cheaper than getting the whole page and preview), or pooling a cache for mastodon users e.g. what https://jort.link/ does
Daniel O'Connor