Getting linked on the mastodon network (tm). A few notes.
A while back, somebody linked to the honk manual. Within one minute, 76 mastodons retrieved the link.
I replied some time later. Within one minute, an additional 58 mastodons fetched the link.
For the day, it amounted to 150 hits, some arriving a bit later. I think not so bad, since it takes me about 200µs to serve this file from cache. It would be more problematic for a larger or more expensive file, however.
There's been some discussion of having the origin provide the preview, and the consequences of fake previews, but I think a reasonable compromise would be to have the origin check if there's a reasonable preview to be had. If the target is not a web page, tune the link so recipients don't try to generate previews.
Also, over the day, 152 hits from Pleroma and 142 from Akkoma, although those numbers are double since every GET is preceded by a HEAD. I'm not sure what happens after the head request, but that could be another way to avoid inflicting unnecessary load.
