As in title. Create post -> link -> paste URL in URL -> nothing happens

I checked after someone else asked, so it's not only me

That seems to be related to piefed.zip. I checked on my instance, piefed.social and piefed.zip. Only piefed.zip didn't fill in the metadata.

Thanks!

Yes it will depend on the instance and on the URL.

To fill in the title and body PieFed needs to make a network request to the url, parse the returned html and find the title and body. Due to the web being fubar these days a lot of web hosts block network requests from data centres - it's not consistent, everywhere does it differently.

It's would be worth trying to do this network request using javascript on the client instead. Although there may be cross-origin security things that get in the way there which might be why it's currently done on the server. I can't remember.