I have to stop posting active links to our content on Mastodon.
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@coffeegeek This may not be what you want, but JWZ seems to have working countermeasures: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mastodon-stampede-returns/
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@doty We looked into some of those previous fixes, didn't work for us, though it's good to know that we'll have to update those fixes because of changes by Mastodon for the user agent.
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@BewilderedBeast @ronzegers @Gargron
No, this is an ongoing problem with Youtube links; I first saw it back in the early summer, and created several threads about the issue. At the time, it appeared to be limited to some of the higher-traffic instances.
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@coffeegeek Hm, I've noticed that my blog seems to get about 600-ish hits shortly after being posted here, but nothing close to the volume required to actually cause downtime. My understanding of Mastodon is very weak, but what kind of numbers hit you when a post gets dropped?
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@coffeegeek Hey - don't know if you're looking for assistance with this problem, but my business is providing WordPress sysadmin support for organizations and publishers. In other words, dealing with this exact kind of headache
It sounds like this issue is hitting you harder than it should be, which sucks.
I'd be happy to get on a Zoom or something sometime, if you'd like to bounce what you've tried so far off someone else to get a sanity check. Totally pro bono, no commitments. Sometimes it's just handy to get a fresh set of eyes on a problem.
If you're interested, ping me. And if not, no worries!
(cc @glyph)
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@ludicity @coffeegeek it'll depend on how distributed your followers are, on first approximation, since you'll get a hit per server (10K followers on 1 server = 1 hit, 1K followers on 1K servers = 1K hits). Of course if the link gets boosted and reshaped, it'll reach more servers and the number of hits will grow. For static pages it's generally sustainable, dynamic ones will want to cache this heavily.
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@ludicity @coffeegeek I wonder if it would make sense to have a stripped down version of the page with only the information needed by the card on it (open graph and Twitter tags, oembed instructions) to be served to social media crawlers.
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I suggest using Cloudflare. It's free and works miracles. It will not break any site elements, a lot of the big sites use their service. It also protects against attacks. You will have to change the DNS settings so that CF is your provider.
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@normis We do. But we cannot use their full caching. It messes up all the dynamic content delivery and images on our website. Trust me, we've tried.
The problem remains how Mastodon does thousands and thousands of card calls within a few milliseconds everytime a URL is posted. They need to fix that.
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@oblomov @ludicity We cannot do that. The amount of work that would require, not only mentioning how it would completely destroy our efforts at SEO (love it or hate it).
The root problem isn't how complex our site or pages is. It's that everytime a high follower-count account on Mastodon, with followers across thousands of instances, posts a URL, that website gets hammerred with thousands of page call requests within a few milliseconds.
