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How does Lemmy/Mastodon/Fediverse store videos and images? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by Blurker@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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As I was browsing lemmy and the fediverse at large, this question kept popping into my head.

Since multimedia files have a much bigger footprint than raw text, it made me feel worried since as time goes, massive resources will be needed to keep up with the big data coming in.

I do wonder if the instances have taken the route of the cloud and just decided to put all of it in something like AWS S3? Or maybe they use self hosted storage with something like minio for object storage?

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[–] laenurd@lemmy.lemist.de 45 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (20 children)

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.

[–] Blurker@programming.dev 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] laenurd@lemmy.lemist.de 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] natflow@apollo.town 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] laenurd@lemmy.lemist.de 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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