It’s almost like the software that powers the internet was designed for a different time and is only still used because there’s monied interest in keeping it around. We need GNUnet.

I have my blog address (which goes to my home server) in my Mastodon profile, and every time I post on Masto, my server gets a request from every Mastodon site that federates with my instance - i.e. hundreds of requests. It’s no problem for my server, because my blog is a static site, but for anything that dynamically generates every single page impression (like worpress or joomla), it could be a problem. Caching settings might help, I suppose.

Truth is, though, I get far more traffic from vulnerability scanners and AI crawlers that don’t honour robots.txt (or aren’t yet listed).

Republican lawmaker and former FBI agent Brian Fitzpatrick is calling for an investigation into restrictions on Starshield for Ukraine. He says that if Elon Musk ordered the slowdown, it was likely illegal because Musk can make decisions about civilian Starlink, but not Starshield, which Fitzpatrick described as a military national security asset. He says he is prepared to call everyone involved, including Musk, before Congress to testify under oath. #Ukraine

@IvanDrago No he tenido peores gripes que las que me pegó el heredero cuando estaba en la guardería.

what

@jwildeboer @homelab just got an email from one of my savings providers that I can't update my 1 year ISA maturity instruction (the ISA matures on the 28th) at the moment. They'll let me know when I can.
Clearly someone is playing safe.

Is there a reason why the publishing instance is not downloading the preview image, and then submits it with the post to the other instances? This way they would not have to fetch it themselves.

Yeah, thats how it should be: one download, everyone else downloads from that server, not the original source.

Seems abusable though

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

Is this the same thing as the “Reddit hug of death”?

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.

i’m feeling less ambivalent about those reddit repost bots for a moment

it seems like ideally it shouldn’t attempt to preview the link before a user tries to view the content. i guess that would increase latency for users though

So we need people to just mass post links to bad websites, is what you’re saying.

truly a wild time to be alive when the cryptography world is split between those worried about quantum computers and those whose private key is “4”

http://arstechnica.com/security/2026/10/the-internet-goes-on-high-alert-after-discovery-of-8-compromised-tls-certs/

#eMudhra

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.

Was ist bei #LoopsVideo los? 😳 https://loops.video/