Mastodon oEmbed requests overload; use WP Rest Cache

Mastodon due to the decentralized nature can result in a significant extra load on your site if someone posts a link to it. Every Mastodon instance where the post is seen (which can be 1 but also 100 or 1000 or …) will request not only the page and sub-sequentially the oEmbed json object to be able to show a preview in Mastodon. The page requests should not an issue as you surely have page caching, but the oEmbed object lives behind /wp-json/ and as such is not cached by page caches. The solution; the WP Rest Cache plugin and one small code snippet (for now). A lot more info can be found in Donncha’s excellent post on the subject.

Twitterless Twaddle revisited

screenshot of my "archived" twitter profileAlthough I removed the “twitterless twaddle” byline from this blog years ago and I was present on Twitter with my @futtta-account, I’ve never been an avid user. That means I have no “social capital” there and given the Musk shit-show it has quickly become, I revisited the Mastodon account I created in April this year (when Elon declared he wanted to buy Twitter) and as instructed by God I happily “archived” my Twitter account by removing all my follows, protecting my tweets, changing my name and gently closing the door behind me (and I finally deactivated my FB account as well).

So if you want to get social with me, I’m https://mastodon.social/@futtta. Not that I’m good at doing the socials, not that I’ll have much to say there, not that Mastodon solves all problems with social media, but it does feel good to be on a federated/ distributed social network using open source software, not owned by one company or one person.