I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here.. For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.
I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.
This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.
Same thing used to happen with reddit giving sites the hug of death lol
It’s unfortunate but kind of expected.
Its not at all the same thing
You’re right, it’s not like… thousands of network connections are happening to the same site in both cases resulting in resource exhaustion.
Oh, wait…
Having things in common does not make them the same thing. I explained this in the OP.
You’re right, neither of them are known for providing thousands and thousands of distributed network connections to the same destination resulting in that same destination server running out of resources. They’re clearly not the same thing at all, no, definitely not at all.