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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 0 points 5 hours ago* (3 children)

Yeah I think a lot of us share this experience. All the stuff we are tought in our educations about clean code and architecture... Once we come out and work, management don't want that stuff if it takes extra time. They want features shipped as soon as possible, and every meeting is about "how fast can you do this feature".

And now of course embracing AI since it's so fast. When things break, engineers will have to figure out the problem when the entire system is down, not management. :)

And then they can have a post mortem where they say that engineering must have better routines...lol.

I no longer work in tech but I quit at the top I think, before Ai was a requirement. And when consulting salaries was still good. Now they are awful.

permalink

fedilink

source

parent

hideshow 3 child comments