Issue with Fetching Toot - Error "503 Remote data could not be fetched

[archos]

Hi everyone,

When I try to manually fetch a toot link through search, it shows an error "503 Remote data could not be fetched". I haven't seen any issues in the logs. The toot can be fetched normally on other servers.

I did some searching and found an older post here stating that the error could be caused by a misconfiguration of Nginx. Although the post is quite old, the problem has only recently appeared.

For about a year, everything worked fine. Just recently, I moved Mastodon from an old server to a new one. Could this issue be related to the migration? Has anyone encountered a similar problem?

I would be very grateful for any advice.

[nebulon]

Do you have an example mastodon account/server where we can reproduce this?

[archos]

@nebulon Yes, for example, this link does not work. What I haven't noticed is that for several days, the previews for YouTube videos haven't been working.

[nebulon]

I can at least see the 503 also on my instance when trying to federate with that one you posted. Both mastodons have the same version. No further error logs on my mastodon server side, so maybe it is worth it if you report this upstream, could just be a mastodon federation bug.

[archos]

@nebulon Thank you for the response. It's strange because I have another instance hosted by Mastohost, also running the latest version, and there are no problems there. By the way, are YouTube previews working fine for you? Maybe it's a bug, but I don't see this issue on other instances.

[nebulon]

No clue if both issues are related. Took me some time to find a toot with youtube in my stream but I guess you refer to:

I don't see any errors anywhere for this, so this may be an instance configuration?

[archos]

@nebulon Yes, I mean the previews. It's strange because the instance has been running for almost a year without any issues. That's why I thought it might be related to the server move. Do you know what I should look for in the configuration?

[nebulon]

I don't know the internals here, but I can see that the preview images appear to be coming from the federated server, this seems to not only be youtube but for example all content which is federated from nodebb instances (can also talk activitypub) have no previews. In either case if you find some answers how this is supposed to work with activitypub, please share

I can see for example the preview and embedded youtube player just fine on some toots, while no large preview and sometimes only a small card for youtube links. So I think this may just depend on how other instances share or how users have tooted.

[archos]

@nebulon I also tried asking in the Matrix group, and it's a known issue. It's something on YouTube's side. Mastodon has tried to reach out and isn't getting any answers.

[nebulon]

Thanks for sharing and good to know they are aware of at least and might come up with solutions.