Dear Fedi friends,

Would you like a visual representation of the "Mastodon Hug of Death"? AKA your site immediately going offline when you post a link on Mastodon... because thousands of servers are trying to fetch the preview image?

I have talked about it in the past and I feel like several people didn't believe me.

I experienced it twice with my self-hosted Ghost blog, before I had Varnish cache protecting it.

Well well well, a few minutes ago I experienced the Hug of Death (also known as the "Mastodon stampede") after posting a link to my Wordpress site. I had made a landing page for my Fedi promo video where you can download shorter clips and stills.

A few SECONDS after posting a toot with the link on Mastodon my Wordpress site went offline.

I immediately deleted the toot and went to check out the dashboard of my web hosting site, so I could clear the cache.

This is the image I saw - I GASPED OUT LOUD: nearly 4000 requests in seconds. That's how you DDOS yourself 🤪​

I just re-posted the toot by adding an image from my computer so that thousands of servers wouldn't try to get the cover image from the post itself (media from a toot overwrite cover images from blog posts)

Just a regular Tuesday afternoon 20 minutes before I need to go get my child from pre-school 😅​

#MySoCalledSudoLife