[HN Gopher] Now, you can embed Mastodon posts in Medium stories
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       Now, you can embed Mastodon posts in Medium stories
        
       Author : ZacnyLos
       Score  : 56 points
       Date   : 2023-04-17 20:28 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.medium.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.medium.com)
        
       | dwighttk wrote:
       | Medium... there's a name I haven't heard in a long time
        
       | mal-2 wrote:
       | This is a cool change. I am a bit disappointed at the prominent
       | 'Follow' button on the embed though. That button won't do what
       | users think it will, because it opens the linked account on its
       | home server, which is not the place where you can take the follow
       | action.
        
       | dahwolf wrote:
       | In particular edge cases this might become a DDOS vector.
       | 
       | Say you have a large following on Mastodon, which means lots of
       | people follow you from lots of other instances. In that case,
       | when you boost ("retweet") content from a small instance, your
       | boost will federate across many servers. Next, as it appears on
       | everyone's timeline in their own instance, it will fetch the post
       | preview details (of the boosted toot) from the unfortunate small
       | instance.
       | 
       | At times this has created such a traffic surge that servers go
       | down, not to mention the hosting bill being affected. To combat
       | this effect, Mastodon software has a random fetch delay for
       | preview images. Still just as much traffic, just not all at once.
       | The user experience price to pay is that previews may not
       | initially show up.
       | 
       | I wonder if this Medium embed plays by the "pacing" rules of
       | Mastodon or just launches an all-out attack. Meaning, a high
       | profile Medium writer can cause huge spikes in traffic.
        
         | Kye wrote:
         | I assume it benefits from Embedly's CDN once it's cached.
        
         | rodgerd wrote:
         | At the moment the problem is mostly the other way around:
         | Mastodon preview fetches function as a DDOS on your site; given
         | the intransigence of the Masto BDFL on this problem, I would be
         | delighted if it were inverted.
        
           | dahwolf wrote:
           | I don't understand. This looks to me like a Medium page that
           | embeds a Mastodon post, hence preview fetching lands on the
           | Mastodon's instance?
           | 
           | That's what the post describes. However, confusingly, the
           | very first screenshot indeed shows the opposite scenario: a
           | Mastodon post with a preview of a Medium article.
        
         | Alex3917 wrote:
         | Content loaded via Embedly is cached after the first load. By
         | default I think it's cached for a few hours.
         | 
         | FWIW Mastodon isn't the only decentralized social network where
         | you can embed published content into Medium; you can do it with
         | email as well, with any thread published on fwdeveryone.com. I
         | documented the process of building our integration here:
         | 
         | https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/how-to-build-an-oembed-inte...
        
       | vertis wrote:
       | The reactions that brought a lot of people to Mastodon are one
       | step in the right direction, but the slowly expanding pool of
       | support is going to be a whole other problem for Twitter.
       | 
       | There is no denying that Mastodon and the fediverse still has a
       | long long way to go, but I'm always heartened by these additions.
        
       | [deleted]
        
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       (page generated 2023-04-17 23:00 UTC)