@wimpy The replies to this are obnoxious. As @jwz has pointed out, this is a real problem, but lots of people are calling this person names, saying he should fix his site, to work around a wasteful Mastodon inefficiency. It's a bug and it needs to be fixed; we shouldn't be generating tens of thousands of requests to make the link preview. It could be generated once and the image could be shared, or it could be cached in some other way.

There is a workaround, sort of. When linking to someone's site, if an image is included in the post a link preview image won't be generated.

@not2b if you generate it once, you will then have one instance generate something obscene and then that'll propagate across the fediverse. See bluesky for example where preview is generated and attached to the post on the client which allows to create fake links and embeds. This is not something you'd want.

@wimpy