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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[–] rimu@piefed.social 2 points 3 weeks ago

Man, I am a cranky bastard sometimes. Shouldn't post when I'm tired.

How about - the origin server, the place where the post was originally created, gets all the metadata (og:image, og:title, etc) and includes that in the Activity that tells other instances about the post? That way there is only one request made to the link and receiving instances can use that to make their preview?

It does mean that receiving instances will need to trust the sender so there's potential for some misrepresentation but that seems acceptable to me.