Having learned about mastodon’s capabilities of being a ddos tool, I wonder: Are URL previews a dark pattern in itself? I feel like you could argue they are, because they may seriously mislead you (a preview could be tailored in a malicious way), scale badly in a federated context (in the naïve case as im... blog.martin-haehnel.de

@matti I kind of dislike link previews, for the reasons you say. I definitely dislike it when an app chooses not to display the raw link at all in favour of only showing a link preview, which can be manipulated.