this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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This will differ greatly from instance to instance. The people running lemmy.world have published some info on their infrastructure. My instance is running on a rather small VPS with 100GB storage, but I will have to rethink my solution rather soon as images and videos from my subbed communities [Edit: which are stored on outside sites] are eating around a gigabyte per day and I think this is likely to increase.
Edit: I want to clarify that I was partially wrong - Lemmy only locally caches content which is hosted on outside sites (e.g. imgur). It does not cache content that was directly uploaded to another Lemmy instance and just embeds the source media.
Is it caching the entire image from the post or just the thumbnail?
Everything. It does some re-encoding when it retrieves content from other instances and you can set limits for pictrs (the software Lemmy uses to host media) regarding file sizes etc.
Edit: I was partially wrong about what is cached, see my original comment
When I was looking into hosting my own instance I thought I saw an option to disable media file replication entirely so that they would always have to be fetched from their home instance.
That would be great to know, any chance you remember where you read that?
No, but I bet I could find it again if I hadn't just imagined it and made it up for this comment. Give me a few.
It's possible that I've misunderstood. And it's also important to note that I was looking into this for the purposes of creating my own, single user instance. I wasn't planning on posting to my own instance, just using it as a single logon where I could control what other instances I federated with.
Here it mentions not installing pict-rs and removing its configuration if you don't need image hosting. My interpretation at the time was that it would mean that no images would be hosted locally on my instance. But that was very early on before I understood more about federation, and now I realize that it may in fact also mean that any content coming from federated instances could have images broken, not that it would load the images from the remote instance. So now, I no longer think that this is a solution for not syncing images, but I'm not at all sure of that.