unfortunately this is exactly why mastodon won't work
I already don't trust mastodon links because 9 times out of 10 they simply don't work. Everyone's tiny hobby server falls over when one post gets big, and obviously not everyone is going to scale their servers to support the load of a viral post that might happen once every 6 months and will be 100x their base load
That is the benefit of centralization, the experience for the end user can be controlled completely. Maybe a Mastodon friendly web cache that anyone running a semi-serious instance could easily opt into (for a fee) is needed. As a hedge to keep your Raspberry Pie instance online if something goes viral.
As a community effort where no one is expecting to get rich it might work.
If someone sent any link or post that is from that Mastodon instance and it went viral, the entire instance will be sent to the ground and out for hours, making the post unavailable to be viewed.
The worst part is journalists and the media have to be told that posting a link from a 'small niche community' on Mastodon will send a flood of traffic that will knock it down offline also giving the impression to others that it is not ready for mainstream at all or even ready to onboard on tens or hundreds of millions of users, daily like Twitter.
It's a fair criticism but I don't feel so fatalistic. This would look a lot different if everyone was opening this post on their own home server instead of chaos.social.
Unfortunately there's no way to construct a link that references the post but opens where it belongs for you. I think there needs to be a fediverse URL protocol to solve for this, ie this HN post would link to `fedi://@jonty@chaos.social/110307532009155432`, then when people clicked it they wouldn't have to talk to chaos.social, because it would be opened at their home server.
Another option could be a 'copy link for public access' that generates a static page for the purpose of sharing widely.
Journalists and media could also run their own server which is scaled for the traffic they expect, and mirror the post there. The main problem is linking to the source of the post instead of linking to a federated representation of it.
I think this is an absolutely absurd take. A post is the same post no matter who views it - it belongs on the instance where it was posted. Sure it might show up in your timeline or comments somewhere else but for the post itself there should only be one canonical link. If mastodon can't manage to show a simple text post with a small image to anonymous visitors without falling over then it's mastodon that needs to change and not how people interact with it. Most people don't even have a fediverse account ffs.
Where is the canonical location to access an email, or read an XMPP message? It's not just that it 'might show up' in my timeline, seeing it on my home server is where I want it to be - that's where I can take actions on it like replying, starring, or boosting. The post belongs in my client because that representation is the one that's relevant to me. I agree that the mastodon software could do better to optimize for public anonymous read, but it's not the most important functionality for the server to do.
> Most people don't even have a fediverse account ffs.
This is why you won't see a Bluesky post linked on HN, no one can open it. Imagine if you could sign up on your choice of thousands of servers and get the same access to the content rather than a central site, that's fediverse, it's not that complex.
