I was recommended to share this article I wrote a few days ago on here, too; so here we are!
The TL;DR is “link embed fetching communes” as a partial “fix” to the issue (pretty buzzwordy, sorry for that)
The proposed solution of an intermediate server caching embeds is needlessly complex. The first server a link is posted to can fetch the embed, then push it out to every server receiving the post.
The first server should be the one it was posted to. Then federate the embed just like the post itself.
If a server is malicious, it doesn’t matter if that malice is transmitted in the post or in the embed, it should be defederated just the same.
Not all servers are equal. I would trust a post from lemmy.world or lemmy.ml to have valid metadata, for example. It’d be great if admins had some way to specify trusted instances (with the biggest 6 instances as initial defaults).
There would be other uses for the trusted instances concept. Automatic sharing of moderation actions, block lists, community lists, etc
Actually an interesting point. My immediate concern with that idea is that it would open the door for disguising things for what they aren’t. The solution was made from the general caution of not trusting remote servers regarding content they not necessarily control.
But yes, that would definitely be a solution, too.
How is this not a caching issue on the linked server? Serving the same info up over and over from memory should be incredibly fast.
Are their pages dynamic and filled with ads and stuff or something that makes this a problem?
If you’ve skimmed over the original publication, it is actually worse: it is a non problem. Other users have pointed out already: ~100MB served over 5 minutes period is quite literally nothing for even one small VPS serving the content independently, let alone a site with CloudFlare in front like they claim to have.
Whatever u do ur going to need to trust that someone is faithfully returning the page data. I guess if the articles where yo be federated themselves then we avoid this problem so it might just be a them problem.
This is certainly not spam but rather a blog response, a time honored practice as old as blogging itself.
OP’s article links to the source article (albeit via its fedipost rather than its blog post; maybe best to link both) and contributes to the online discourse with a long form reply, detailing a possible solution.
Mischaracterizing such a clearly well-intentioned contribution as “blog spam” is disingenuous.
edit: thanks for retracting your comment. I hope my retort won’t dissuade you from continuing to engage in this community :)
