Conversation

It looks like the Mastodon Slashdot effect is coming up again.

Yes, if a site requires 190 http requests and 15MB to serve the homepage, or 400 https requests and 26MB to serve an article page, I can see why a traffic spike might impact it.

I am not sure that this is solely a problem for the fediverse software stack to solve though?

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Perhaps I'm just old to remember the Slashdot effect, and to think that this is a problem as old as the hills.

Especially with sites which draw on a lot of server resources.

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@neil Not *solely* (clearly it'd be beneficial if they shrank it), but that every Fediverse server seems to generate the link preview is still a stampede problem.
That really out to be bundled with the post.

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@larsmb @neil Maybe instances could be marked as trusted to provide previews. AIUI the problem is rogue/single user instances intentionally sending misleading previews.

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@neil I find it telling that the ppl making these shit sites are upset about fedi "DoS'ing" their site but couldn't care less that their site is DoS'ing my browser and LTE quota. đŸ€Ź

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@dalias @neil I mean, people can already post misleading information, text, images etc, and wild claims about others (such as a screenshot of what someone has supposedly said), so I'm not sure how that'd be made worse?

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@larsmb @neil I would assume it's the whole shock-site (or less extreme, Rickroll) factor, where there's a long history/culture of making misleading links trying to get ppl to click thru.

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@dalias @larsmb @neil It would also be less of an issue if requesting a link preview was a request to a different route that essentially just performs a single database query and can much more easily be cached

like oembed for example

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