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Comment by mal-2 | Hacker News Reader

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> It looks like these links auto-redirect when I access them from here, but when you access them from the homeserver they are served without redirect

"Works on my machine" isn't going to cut it for running a popular social network

Nobodies going to go around searching for mirrors, they'll just leave and go back to twitter

They will just miss out on low-effort posts from sites with semi-technical populations, like this one. It isn’t a big loss really.

Found a similar situation, but I think the key is mostly if you're on one of those servers and seek out the content or if you're logged into one of those servers, it won't forward you (even if you click it from here, assuming same browser/container).

This works from a Calckey instance, just confirmed. https://calckey.social/notes/9ebxxsy83i

yah that's fine, but the replication to other domains does no good for the typical user on the web who only has a link to the original URL, clicks it, sees an error page, and then clicks away

I understand. In my view it will be important to have a fediverse URL protocol so that these links are not aimed at the original domain, and instead open at your home server, or in a mobile app connected to the home server.

Lol this is great.

Try making a link to your email address without knowing which email provider your audience is using and you'll understand the utility.

Okay, I guess I'm not getting it either, but how is it federated/decentralized if they all redirect to the original server which throws a 429?

The federation occurred when the post was made, it was sent out to other servers and stored there. Then it got served to those users directly, without further contacting chaos.social.

To understand how it's decentralized, search for @jonty@chaos.social on your own fediverse home server and the post will pop up.

There's a particular user story here which is a bunch of people who don't have accounts on any server, wanting to see the content from a central location (chaos.social). I do think it's worth talking about this story and ways to fix it but it's not really accurate to blame it on the federation behavior.

They redirect you if you aren't logged in so you can't use them as an anonymous proxy. If you're logged in on your homeserver, you'll get that server's view of the post.

Could you expand on why being an anonymous proxy would be an issue in this case? I can't think of anything interesting off the top of my head.

You can't post (because you're not logged in), so there's no issues with moderation. The toot is already federated publically, so there's no issues with unintentional read access. It doesn't need to contact the original server, so there shouldn't be any load/DDoS issues. I must be missing something…

I produced those links by finding the post on each server so I was also surprised that they redirect when accessed directly. I mean it showed me the post without being logged in, and then I copied what was in the URL bar. Given how much browsing is available without being logged in I agree this should be fine if it loaded normally.

ugh I wish I had tried to generate these through a non-mastodon instance, could have saved a lot of confusion. It works fine through Calckey:

https://calckey.social/notes/9ebxxsy83i

All of these redirect to web.archive.org. Are they using it to offload traffic? That doesn't seem very nice.

No, all of these redirect to the original server when viewed by not-logged-in users. The original server has chosen to redirect to web.archive.

None of these links work for me. 429's on all of them right now.

You're being redirected to chaos.social because you don't have an account on those other servers.

To be fair, each of those is returning 429 at the time of this post.

Translating, I that's only the experience for "non logged in users". Mastodon isn't meant to handle load from the the anonymous public, it's meant for a federation of servers.

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