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?
pimeys 3 points 3 years ago
Btw, if somebody here makes an instance with pictrs sending data to S3, it would be really cool if you would document it and write a guide how to enable it with a common Ansible deployment. It seems that the docker image doesn't take any environment variables, or at least there is no documented way how to turn on the object storage using the pictrs docker image. Maybe it's not implemented yet, and somebody needs to fork the docker image...
majorswitcher 6 points 3 years ago
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
majorswitcher 2 points 3 years ago
lots of traffic on many small files eventually uses more disk space and bandwidth. Depends on the growth of the instance
AnonStoleMyPants 2 points 3 years ago
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?
majorswitcher 4 points 3 years ago
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
majorswitcher 1 point 3 years ago
Thats the way the decentralized fediverse works (I think!) let me know if Iโm wrong
majorswitcher 2 points 3 years ago
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
alex 1 point 3 years ago
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.
majorswitcher 1 point 3 years ago
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 ?
hellothisisdog 5 points 3 years ago
the docs don't explicitly specify but you can see in the image url that they do end up on the instance you upload to
Silviecat44 6 points 3 years ago
Does that cost the instance creator anything?
hellothisisdog 7 points 3 years ago
i mean, it depends on how they are hosting the instance, i guess. it would certainly take up storage space wherever they host the instance. you could always try to upload images somewhere else like imgur and then link it to help not take up their instance storage
Silviecat44 3 points 3 years ago
I see. Thanks!
hellothisisdog 2 points 3 years ago
np ๐
majorswitcher 6 points 3 years ago
yes. running a server costs money. I have lemmyfly.org running just 2 days now on digitalocean using a cheap 1GB ram, 25GB diskspace and 1000GB bandwidth for $7,- a month. Storing images on the server will eventually take up all space and bandwidth meaning you have to upscale -> pay more.
Using a different location for storing images and/ or videos is best to offload the instance !
alex 3 points 3 years ago
My understanding is that images don't federate by default and you'll load the image from whichever server it was uploaded to initially. Uploading an image here in the comment certainly does that:
This post that shows in my instance loads it's image from feddit.uk, even when it shows on my own instance rather than on this URL:
Looking at the federation docs, I'm pretty confident that a link to the image is the only thing going through. If someone uploads that on the server directly, that'll be a link to that server, but it may be a link to Imgur or something too.
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asklemmy
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A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๏ฟฝ*
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
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Looking for support?
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If you run the normal Ansible setup, there's one docker container running pictrs that's going to handle the image uploads. By default, it stores it into a volume that comes from the server's filesystem. So when you upload an image, it gets stored to the server's file system with the default settings.
Pictrs supports object storage, and you can get it to store the images to any S3 compatible storage.
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