I’m not sure how long it took, but for a while the instance had crashed. For some reason the Lemmy photo upload service took up 150GB of free space and hence the server crashed because of it. I’m not sure about the possibility of recurrence as I don’t know the exact reason.
For this reason, you can follow our Mastodon account, which I have just opened, to follow or report possible crashes.
This happened to my instance too, it’s the pictrs log file. Need to set the environment to have a rotating log to stop it ballooning
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I believe having a photo upload feature on the platform itself is a big plus, but I’m not sure how long I can go on. For now, around 15GB of files have accumulated. It’s not big enough to be alarming.
The error we are experiencing right now is not because of the photos, but because of the service itself.
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Cost is always a thing. Like if you are going to have big files, than your backup is going to be big backup too. Copyright is also important. There may be a need for an offshore server as there is a risk that the entire site will be shut down due to a random Onlyfans user’s lawsuit. Things get complicated when Lemmy gets involved. I don’t really know if Lemmy can handle that much media.
Anyways, I’m really not sure. All will become clear this month hopefully.
The image server for Lemmy is called pict-rs and is really well made. Imo Lemmy stops scaling before it. You can configure it to use object storage (Amazon S3) for example, which is probably the cheapest option to store a lot of data right now.
Pict-rs integration hard-coded into Lemmy backend. So I can’t use object storage right now unfortunately. I wish I had that option.
Pictrs itself seems to support S3 as a backend. I think they’re talking about that.
https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs#user-content-filesystem-to-object-storage-migration
Yeah I asked this on lemmy repo after this comment. It seems like I really can switch to object storage with release candicate right now. There is 130gb of free storage on the server so I will wait for stable version until it fills up. Hopefully they releases stable in the mean time.
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Thank you for your support! Hope we don’t need it for a while :)
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I don’t think it makes any sense. If disk space starts to fill up and I can’t find a solution; I would turn off the upload service and suggest other platforms. But still any content uploaded should stay.
If someone upload the same image several times, it get several copies in the server storage or is only one copy what point to all the posts?
Pictrs filtering those as i remember.
Should we upload media elsewhere? I am concerned about whats happening to imgur making outside uploads unsafe.
Thanks for the update and working to give us a porn space.
I don’t think we should rely on Lemmy’s uploading at all. The whole federation is very unstable, the last thing it needs is to have gigabytes of porn sent to it.
There’s no clear replacement for Imgur yet but there are viable alternatives.
I have been using Free Image Host for my own, at least for now.
Catbox is simple but unfortunately unreliable as well. Had it go down a few times out of nowhere.
Both of those are very compatible with Sharex.
IMGPile is another choice, and it also has gallery support IIRC though only if you register.
Images are stored by a seperate service - pictrs. It should be possible to run it on an entirely different server, as well as with block storage.
What happened to Imgur?
They are purging all existing NSFW posts and banning new uploads.
I’m worried about media on any other sharing site. Just look how the Imgur change has broken so many old Reddit posts.
PixelFed might be worth looking into, if you’re considering hosting images off-site.
At some point a couple days ago, I stopped being able to update icons or banners on communities. I’ve tried everything I can think of on my side, including appointing a friend as a mod, who was also unable to edit the images.
[EDIT] I had both English and Undetermined selected somehow, and as per user suggestion I fixed that, and it worked! I can now update images, I just had to select ONLY undetermined.
