Direct link to article:
https://news.itsfoss.com/mastodon-link-problem/
TL;DR:
When you share a link on Mastodon, a link preview is generated for it, right?
With Mastodon being a federated platform (a part of the Fediverse), the request to generate a link preview is not generated by just one Mastodon instance. There are many instances connected to it who also initiate requests for the content almost immediately.
And, this “fediverse effect” increases the load on the website’s server in a big way.
Does Lemmy not cause this issue? Other federated software was not mentioned in the article at all.
So the preview should be federated as well?
How many requests are we actually talking about here, though? Is that better or worse than everyone clicking the link?
There’s some problem with a federated previews: tricking one instance into generating the wrong preview would spread to every instance. It’s been exploited for malware and scam campaigns in message apps.
Here’s a related, interesting example for BlueSky, on generating disguised links and preview cards (with content the url doesn’t actually contain) for anyone curious: https://github.com/qwell/bsky-exploits
Lemmy (and Kbin for that matter) very much do the same thing for posts. I don’t think they fetch URL previews for links in comments, but that doesn’t matter: posts and comments are both fairly likely to end up spreading to Mastodon/etc anyway, so even comments will trigger this cascade.
Direct example: If you go to mastodon.social, stick @fediverse@lemmy.world in the search box at the topleft and click for the profile, you can end up browsing a large Mastodon server’s view of this community, and your very link has a preview. (Unfortunately, links to federated communities just result in a redirect, so you have to navigate through Mastodon’s UI.)
