🎵 #NowPlaying on https://labr.online

🎵 The Work Shop 146
🎤 Ken Walker

#LABR #radio #Fediradio #communityradio #fediwave #music #dj #mixes #house #hiphop #rnb #rock

That second solution is what I thought of as doing as I read this. It doesn’t rely on a third party service being up. And that instance has to do that work anyway. So why not just share the results with others?

Thanks for bringing this up. I think in general we need to work on optimisation of Activitypub and Threadiverse implementations of it.

Similar, except those are caused by users visiting a link, whereas the Fediverse issue is federated servers gathering info before users even see a link.

going back to physical media (books, DVDs, CDs, vinyl) is making me think a lot about how much easier it was to tell someone “hey, listen or watch or read this!” back then than it is now

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. Another example 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.

There are two proposed solutions I have seen. I do not claim that this is exhaustive, just only limited to the proposals that I have stumbled across.

FASP - Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider

The idea that mastodon has is to have a third-party service that does something like generate a link preview once and then share that to fediverse instances that need it. They have a whole spec they wrote up about these kinds of services that can be run to help out fediverse instances with different things like this, search, or discoverability. They call these FASPs - the repo with the spec is here.

I don’t yet know of any FASP that is live and running, so it is kind of a paper spec at the moment. I don’t do too much on the microblogging side of the fediverse though, so I very well could be wrong.

Federate link metadata and the post at the same time

This comes from an issue on PieFed’s repo. It is basically just an idea at this point, but it is a pretty basic one; have the originating instance fetch the link preview information and simply federate it out alongside the post itself.

Since a few days, we got our first CDN node in Latin America. Provided and run by the amazing Undernet community in Uruguay, @santiago!

Thanks to them, users in the region will benefit from faster map downloads. For a start, we are exploring how well it works with users based out of Uruguay, Argentina and Venezuela.

If you are interested and able to help your local area in a similar way, get in touch!

And you can learn more about Undernet here: https://undernet.uy/

@HubertManne

You're saying "User control is what's important.", which has several huge flaws.

The first is that it places the onus on the victim. We see this all the time on Babka. An attacker attacks people on our server either directly by creating a bunch of harassing accounts, or through disinformation campaigns spread across the network.

Such coordinated attacks aren't addressable with the "block button".

The second is that it furthers the victimization by forcing persecuted minorities into the digital ghetto. I've seen this as well. We complain to another server about the abusive behavior of one of their users and the admin's response is "If you don't want to be harassed, de-federate."

Imagine if you called the police about being beaten up on the street and the police said "If you don't like it, don't leave your house."

1/2

epic news ofw has fallen

@ask how many total accounts?

@BobHorowitz Oh AllTheBadwordsTogether I am so sorry to hear this. What a pain in the arse literally. I'm sorry you have to keep dealing with this stuff.