I can't help but thinking this is more a case of fix your own shit. Rather than bitching about mastodon.
Pretty much any website beyond some self hosted personal blog should have no issues with the number of requests being talked about here...
Maybe if someone like @cstross was to be posting the link. That might be legit breaking. But for most mortals. It shouldn't be.
Fix your shit.
@cirdanlunae that's basically it yes.
@quixoticgeek also how exactly does a deliberately decentralised network ‘step up’ even assuming this was a thing to which one can and should step up?
@hardingar @quixoticgeek preview caching hierarchy that instance operators can join, to share the download - making sure it hits the original website only once.
@dubiousblur @hardingar @quixoticgeek fast sounds like centralisation, tho…
honestly, i hope that the proliferation of the Fediverse and its mode of operation causes shitty sites to stop having a preview image, especially given that most of those have been ML generated nonsense for the past couple years
@meena @hardingar @quixoticgeek sudden urge to investigate squid caching algorithm, and wonder about nearest-neighbour. Can’t be centralised if it’s a mesh…
@dubiousblur @hardingar @quixoticgeek i used to work on Apache Traffic Server.
The caching algorithm and the eviction algorithms are fairly simple. (If you ignore that it took fifteen years to interpret and iron out)
But the code to actually put stuff on the disk and retrieve it, as fast as possible, is weirdly complex. tho, ATS has tiered storage (RAM, SSD, HDD) so that makes it a bit more complex
@meena @hardingar @quixoticgeek irreducible complexity. :)
No point reinventing _that_ wheel, just takes some hooks in Mastdon & other server software and
social agreement.
It’s always a people problem isn’t it.
@dubiousblur @meena @quixoticgeek oh wow. Back before my tech skills degraded I ran a national squid cache hierarchy. You don’t want to know the hardware but I tuned the fuck out of it.
@dubiousblur @quixoticgeek free cdn Jim, but not as we know it.
@quixoticgeek @hardingar _always be surprising_
@quixoticgeek hm, seems to be a legit issue. I agree that the websites should have better caching for these previews in order to avoid contention. But then, these small blogs will rely on free publishing software, not much they can do about it.
All that said, what rubs me wrong is that attitude of „shouldn’t FOSS care about us small people more?“, when communities like „it’s FOSS“ should be more aware that people should still pay for stuff they care about. (Free as in beer not labor etc)
@quixoticgeek @felixf platform providers gotta eat too
@quixoticgeek @cstross I was kind of amused when they asked "should we pay for a CDN?" Err... if you run a high traffic website that uses a lot of images & JavaScript, yes! Why are you still on Cloudflare's free plan?!
@quixoticgeek Would you be willing to help me figure out what exactly the issue is that itsfoss is having with Mastodon? I'm a novice about web-related anything. From what I get, they're saying that they can't handle the influx of traffic from when things are posted on the fediverse? I'm guessing that this shouldn't be an issue for a site such as theirs in this day and age? Help this noob plz? Thanks for reading!