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How does Lemmy/Mastodon/Fediverse store videos and images?
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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.
Thank you for your work for the community! I think with more people using lemmy, we should also as users lookout for the infra we are using because the admins are not a mega corporation ready to spin up infinite resources.
No need to thank me, currently I am the only non-bot-user of my instance and do not allow registrations 😅
Many of the bigger instances have links to donate to their operators, but I am doubtful that relying solely on donations will be enough in the long run.
Since you’re the only one, you might consider setting an expiration on the media so your local storage serves as more of a cache. Like, I’m sure you’re far more likely to revisit a recent thread than a super old one, and as long as the original instance is still around you could redownload the media. This might require software patches though idk
Firstly: I was partially wrong about what gets cached, see my original comment.
There is an open pull request which is meant to give some options regarding media serving. Right now it's only a rough sketch though and does not implement a lot functionality.