This time I was trying to follow a link from a post by @cmdr_nova and there it is again, my friend: "Fehler: Netzwerk-Zeitüberschreitung" … error network time overstepping something something. As I've been arguing for a long time, the insistence of web sites to provide link previews is killing those web sites if they're small and built for a small readership. Nobody wants to add caches and other complications if they only have a few readers. When a link gets posted on the fediverse and that post spreads, then all the servers want a link preview. They contact the original site and request the HTML, and an image. The do this no matter wether somebody actually clicks the link or not! It's CO₂ wasted for the CO₂ god, just to make the experience of the first person looking at the post a tiny bit more pleasant because they won't have to wait. And all the servers keep a copy of the data for a few days. All of them. CO₂ for the CO₂ god!

Mastodon can be used as a DDOS tool, the issue on GitHub:
https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/4486

Blocking popular user agents using the web server configuration (in this case, using Apache):

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_USER_AGENT}" "Mastodon|Friendica|Pleroma" [nocase]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ - [forbidden,last]