@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org
Post #2110390
2026-04-27 15:21 UTC
@ClarusPlusPlus
Fun fact: because all Mastodon instances must separately fetch the linked page to generate a preview, a link that goes viral on Mastodon can generate a large surge of traffic to the linked page and overload the server. Everybody gets a preview but nobody can see the actual page!
All the more reason to code one's website efficiently, I suppose. Besides viral Mastodon posts, websites also get a lot of traffic from AI crawler bots these days.
Replies (1)
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@argv_minus_one@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-04-27 15:23
@ClarusPlusPlus I notice that if I view your two posts on my instance, *both* of them are missing a preview. I wonder if my instance's admins turned off preview generation for YouTube links? Might be to save bandwidth and/or CPU on the mastodon.sdf.org server. I know they've been having trouble recently with it being slow, so that might be one of the things they've done to make it not slow.