While the feature is problematic, commenters pointed out that some previews are helpful – e.g. on Wikipedia, where a preview will appear when people hover over a wiki-linked page.

Other commenters pondered about some minimal way to replicate this elsewhere, and it seemed to be worth investigation. Read on as I propose an enhancement to the Fediverse (and maybe even web standards) to make Link Previews great: the Link Preview Manifest.

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[–] INeedMana@piefed.zip 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the previews should be federated along with the activity. The main issue described by itsfoss and the mastodon bug is not about previews themselves generating a lot of traffic but federated nature of fediverse multiplying the number of requests. If along with the post/toot/w-v the preview got sent out too, that might ease the load on the publishing host

[–] yoasif@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago

One thing that I neglected to mention is that since the SRI hashes are calculated, previews can be cached by peers other than the originating host - since they are verifiable, anyone can pass them along and the client can verify the payload.

Not something I really fleshed out in discovery, but if there is interest, that might make it more production ready.