Word up about sharing Pixelfed links into Bluesky. Please do it, it's a great way to publicise Pixelfed, as 90% of ordinary folks have no idea it exists. If you share, please click a space after the url, or into the embed link panel that shows up, and wait for the preview to populate, otherwise you just get the raw link and its not a pretty preview. If you wait a few moments, the image will show up (at least it works on pixelfed.de :)
#Mastodon delays firm fix for #linkpreviews that #DDoS sites
Many websites and apps offer previews of their online content that usually each contain a headline, a subheadline, a small excerpt, and an image. When someone on Mastodon posts a link to that content, their Mastodon instance fetches the preview from the content's host server to display in people's Mastodon feeds.
Decentralization is great until everyone wants to grab data from your #webserver
https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/06/mastodon_delays_fix_ddos/
"You might not be on Mastodon yet, but your blog could get a torrent of traffic from Mastodon, or other #Fediverse network if it’s shared there."
... because of fedi servers fetching data to create link preview cards.
"If your website is mentioned there, it might be the “victim” of an inadvertent denial of service attack, as hundreds or thousands of servers request the URL in the 60 seconds or so afterwards."
https://odd.blog/2023/01/02/the-mastodon-onslaught-on-your-blog/
WTF. Now I’m not getting link previews from Medium at all? Grrr.
@mhoye I am sure there are features that will only work or scale on centralized systems, but I don't think #LinkPreviews are one of them. There are ways to do it that won't #DDoS; we just haven't (yet) put the effort into figuring it out because the #Fediverse hasn't been big enough for it to matter (much). It would be nice if we got ahead of the curve and fixed that problem before it got bad, but that probably won't happen. Nevertheless I'm sure we'll fix it eventually.
