BREAKING: Sharing links on Mastodon?

[mnnhnewsenglish@brands.town]

BREAKING: Sharing links on Mastodon? Think again, our perfectly normal and reasonable website can't handle people linking to it. https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=4563egrfgfe https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=5432fss https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=56709 https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=aogre https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=jklpsdcfv https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=kakakakaka https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=ujqjkzx https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=poplijux https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=981 https://itsfoss.com/news/mastodon-link-problem/?a=dfsglmdfgsz

[tobi@goblin.technology]

@MNNHNewsEnglish how are people making web servers that shit the bed so badly when serving a website, fucking hell

[fristi@56k.dile-up.nl]

@MNNHNewsEnglish tbh it's an unfixable problem. Request spam is an inherent feature of microblog federation and the only way to solve it is by not federating at all.

[kura@hai.z0ne.social]

@fristi@56k.dile-up.nl @MNNHNewsEnglish@brands.town or use a centralized cache server. which is worse tbh

[wcbdata@vis.social]

@fristi @MNNHNewsEnglish If posting a link generated a thumbnail/preview at the same time that the internal link shortening occurs, Mastodon could federate the preview through the same mechanism as image federation, reducing the load on the website and reducing the number of previews to, at most, the number of servers federated to. Maybe?

[mnnhnewsenglish@brands.town]

@wcbdata @fristi In principle yes, but this introduces a trust issue.

[wcbdata@vis.social]

@MNNHNewsEnglish @fristi not really. We already do the same for images, right?

[luna@evy.pet]

@MNNHNewsEnglish@brands.town

The current solution includes blocking Mastodon as a user-agent, which would disable our link previews, making it look like spam and uninformative.

I wouldn't say that is the current solution, it is a solution
You can also work to reduce the effects. You know the user agent format, you can provide a reduced page which takes less on your server. It's not a perfect solution but at least improves things a bit.
And I don't know if mastodon was designed expecting to have so many instances running. As we've learned from the Internet, some duct tape solves it ​​

[purple@woof.tech]

@MNNHNewsEnglish It kills me how they're using cloudflare but they say it doesn't help.

Which tells me they do not use cloudflare correctly, as this should be the world's most cacheable request