Teri Kanefield
Okay techies: Every time I post a link to my website on Mastodon, everyone (including me) is shut out of my website for about 5 mintutes with an "error 500" message.
This doesn't happen when I post anywhere else, and I get 10 time the traffic from other sources.
People have offered me and my tech support staff (my husband) solutions. None of them worked.
Evan Prodromou
@renchap can we collaborate on a spec for this? /cc @Teri_Kanefield
Renaud Chaput
@Teri_Kanefield I am sorry for this, this is a known Mastodon issue. Basically, when you post a link, every Mastodon instance receiving your post will try to download the page to generate the link preview, and for popular accounts like yours this might be a few thousand of requests.
We have plans to improve this in the near future, in the meantime having some basic HTTP caching on your blog should help.
Wary Jerry
@gearhead I can't find the issue right now, but there is a githb issue in the mastodon issue list to generate the preview card for a link on the instance the link is posted from - and have the preview card distributed with the post, rather than expecting each instance to create their own card.
@steveo1049 @tw000 @Teri_Kanefield
David Gerhart
@steveo1049 @tw000 @Teri_Kanefield @jerry
I wouldn't agree that it's a fedi-bug. But a consequence of equal access over the internet.
Hosting on a platform that is dynamically responsive (AWS, Azure, GHS) and designing for high requester peaks seems appropriate.
David Gerhart
@steveo1049 @tw000 @Teri_Kanefield @jerry
Another method, is to post via a separate server instance - to serve the toot requests, leaving the primary to serve 'normal' traffic. Let the 'mirror' server grind out serving the excess traffic.
I'm probably way off on the assessment tho...
SteveO ✅ - For Harris 🇺🇸
@tw000 @Teri_Kanefield @jerry - so, it’s a Fedi-bug!
tw000
@Teri_Kanefield It's my understanding that this is the link-preview function bombarding your server as the link spreads across the fediverse.
@jerry might have some helpful thoughts on this.
feld
tw000
@feld @gearhead @jerry @steveo1049 @Teri_Kanefield As @malwaretech demonstrated a while back, the current system can be manipulated. It's a choice and I wouldn't be opposed to it being a setting available to each instance to make that choice.
feld
Wary Jerry
@feld I think we’ve likely crossed a threshold where it’s not a hypothetical concern any longer, now that we have 20k instances. @gearhead @tw000 @steveo1049 @Teri_Kanefield
Evan Prodromou
@renchap awesome, thanks. Ive been talking about the issue with some other folks so I'd love to compare notes.
Renaud Chaput
@evan Sure. This is on the 4.3 roadmap but I am not sure we will be able to deliver it, it has many implications, both in term of protocol and implementation, mostly because preview generation must be an async process.
I will try to write down our thoughts on this topic (we have been discussing this for many months), and share it to you
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.