When you upload an image in the URL bar when creating a post, where does it go? Are they hosted on the respective Instance of the community?
When you upload an image in the URL bar when creating a post, where does it go? Are they hosted on the respective Instance of the community?
yes, they are hosted on the server that is running the Lemmy instance. But every other instance that is linked to that instance will ‘scrape’ all posts incl images and store them on they’re own server. So posts and images are served from the instance you yourself are a member of
That seems weird. So the more people are here and longer Lemmy instances (any of them) are up the more storage each instance needs? Soon you can’t have small instances because you will need tons of storage for all pictures that have ever been posted in any of the instances?
only pictures and posts that the instance-member are subscribed to, and from the moment they interacted with it. But yes, I’m curious to see where this goes.
I noticed it when I was looking in the database and disk on my instance, where there are already thousands of posts and more then a thousand images - while my own instance only has a couple of posts and images
But it still means if a single user on a small instance is subscribed to a massive media instance, they alone will generate tons of traffic and storage requirement… Seems really weird
Thats the way the decentralized fediverse works (I think!) let me know if I’m wrong
Maybe it doesn’t matter so much because image files are usually relatively small, but it seems kind of inefficient. I wonder if BitTorrent could help somehow.
lots of traffic on many small files eventually uses more disk space and bandwidth. Depends on the growth of the instance
As far as I can see, images aren’t federated, only a link to the image.
When I look on my server in the volumes/pictrs folder, there are a LOT of images that I recognize from my feed. They are not from posts posted to my server but belong to posts of communities that I have subscribed to
Are they thumbnails? If not, perhaps this is configurable… I’ll check out my own images folder and see if it’s pulling them in, but it definitely shows the remote url for images when I’m viewing them on my instance.
no, a random image I just now check was 3.3mb even. But you’re right, the image source does point to the origins server location… Then why are all those images stored on the server ?
OK, I’ve just realised something new - images pulled from websites as thumbnails are uploaded to the server and appear to be basically full sized, i.e.:
https://agora.nop.chat/pictrs/image/59cfdd9c-2f69-4e8d-8afc-6fbc0c1cca87.jpeg
This image is on my server, but it’s just pulled from the website as a thumbnail. This doesn’t seem to be super consistent in how it’s handled - I’m continuing to look at what’s causing it and why it doesn’t seem to happen all the time.
EDIT: Seems like there’s more on there than I expected. Gonna continue digging.