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> Does it mean that posting a link on Mastodon generates 36704 requests to that URL?

No, it's a ratio of bytes for traffic . They're counting size of 1 request to post to Mastodon "a single roughly ~3KB POST", vs the total size of content served from GETing the url in that post.

IDK how valid this metric is, but that's what they're saying.



I don't see how the request size to mastodon is at all relevant to the resulting traffic.


It's the language of "traffic amplification" as a network attack (1) as used in a DDOS. it's perhaps more relevant when comparing the total bytes in a number of IP Packets of various sizes.

I'm not saying that this is the optimal framing, but that's what they were going for: talking about this, correctly or not, as a de facto DDOS.

1) https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2022/05/23/ana...




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