When you share a link on Mastodon, a link preview is generated for it, right?

With Mastodon being a federated platform (a part of the Fediverse), the request to generate a link preview is not generated by just one Mastodon instance. There are many instances connected to it who also initiate requests for the content almost immediately.

And, this "fediverse effect" increases the load on the website's server in a big way.

Does Lemmy not cause this issue? Other federated software was not mentioned in the article at all.

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 7 points 6 months ago (6 children)

So the preview should be federated as well?

How many requests are we actually talking about here, though? Is that better or worse than everyone clicking the link?

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 9 points 6 months ago (4 children)

There's some problem with a federated previews: tricking one instance into generating the wrong preview would spread to every instance. It's been exploited for malware and scam campaigns in message apps.

[–] poplargrove@lemmy.world 3 points 6 months ago

Here's a related, interesting example for BlueSky, on generating disguised links and preview cards (with content the url doesn't actually contain) for anyone curious: https://github.com/qwell/bsky-exploits

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