i'm about to describe some pie in the sky but: what if a relay could do expensive processing like calculating standardized post text and image embeddings (or even just fetching link preview cards), and then consumers that decide to trust that relay could skip recomputing/refetching all that stuff, so they'd only need to calc query embeddings locally (and local posts obvi). some guy could put an old gaming PC in his garage and then hundreds of Fedi servers could do less work.

how's that Mastodon thing for "Fediverse providers" going anyway

also why aren't we using torrents for post media. did people forget torrents exist again

@vyr Launching your pie higher into the sky: surely there’s some way that sites could sign their open graph metadata so that only the originating server (or even client) would need to fetch the preview card and every other server could verify its integrity.

AFAIK at least Bluesky and iMessage fetch link previews client side on the sender’s device and blindly trust whatever the client sends, so a standard would have wide applicability (not just fedi) and big sites might actually want to adopt it

@dale_price in principle yes, in practice signing stuff is a colossal pain in the ass because then you need to deal with managing keys, figuring out when keys are valid and when their signatures are valid, handling revocations, etc., plus even defining what you're signing is tricky (look at HTTP Signatures as an example)

something like Subresource Integrity might be more realistic, but even then you also need to figure out a way to request only the OGP gunk from a page (maybe content type negotiation?) in such a way that you can reliably get a checksum for the exact bytes, and then figure out how that extends to preview images which might themselves be content type negotiated or otherwise vary depending on what's retrieving them

and then you need to get enough sites to do it to matter, which is a harder problem than all of the engineering put together