In particular edge cases this might become a DDOS vector.
Say you have a large following on Mastodon, which means lots of people follow you from lots of other instances. In that case, when you boost ("retweet") content from a small instance, your boost will federate across many servers. Next, as it appears on everyone's timeline in their own instance, it will fetch the post preview details (of the boosted toot) from the unfortunate small instance.
At times this has created such a traffic surge that servers go down, not to mention the hosting bill being affected. To combat this effect, Mastodon software has a random fetch delay for preview images. Still just as much traffic, just not all at once. The user experience price to pay is that previews may not initially show up.
I wonder if this Medium embed plays by the "pacing" rules of Mastodon or just launches an all-out attack. Meaning, a high profile Medium writer can cause huge spikes in traffic.
Content loaded via Embedly is cached after the first load. By default I think it's cached for a few hours.
FWIW Mastodon isn't the only decentralized social network where you can embed published content into Medium; you can do it with email as well, with any thread published on fwdeveryone.com. I documented the process of building our integration here:
At the moment the problem is mostly the other way around: Mastodon preview fetches function as a DDOS on your site; given the intransigence of the Masto BDFL on this problem, I would be delighted if it were inverted.
I don't understand. This looks to me like a Medium page that embeds a Mastodon post, hence preview fetching lands on the Mastodon's instance?
That's what the post describes. However, confusingly, the very first screenshot indeed shows the opposite scenario: a Mastodon post with a preview of a Medium article.
Say you have a large following on Mastodon, which means lots of people follow you from lots of other instances. In that case, when you boost ("retweet") content from a small instance, your boost will federate across many servers. Next, as it appears on everyone's timeline in their own instance, it will fetch the post preview details (of the boosted toot) from the unfortunate small instance.
At times this has created such a traffic surge that servers go down, not to mention the hosting bill being affected. To combat this effect, Mastodon software has a random fetch delay for preview images. Still just as much traffic, just not all at once. The user experience price to pay is that previews may not initially show up.
I wonder if this Medium embed plays by the "pacing" rules of Mastodon or just launches an all-out attack. Meaning, a high profile Medium writer can cause huge spikes in traffic.