Hello everyone!

TL;DR - Photo storage will continue to grow as time goes on. Maybe we can delete photos after X amount of time to reduce storage space? Maybe we can disable uploads altogether?

We’re coming up on about a year since the current management took over this Lemmy instance.

Since then, a lot has changed behind the scenes. We switched to a new host, migrated the pictures to “object storage” which is super cheap, and figured out an auto-posting bot which works ok most of the time.

I’d like to gauge your opinion on photos. Users have the ability of uploading their beautiful SOTD photos to this Lemmy instance. It creates a URL which can be used anywhere on the web. (people can also upload bad photos, copy the URL without creating a post, and share it on the dark corners of the internet. We have a process to hopefully catch that sort of thing.)

Additionally, photos from other instances get stored in our photo storage as things get federated.

Ideally we would be able to delete all of the “fluff”, and keep all of the nice pictures that people have uploaded, because honestly it doesn’t take much storage for those. Unfortunately we don’t have a tool to do that. Instead, stuff just never gets deleted.

Currently, our photos storage takes up 20GB. Last year, if I remember correctly, it was closer to 4 or 5GB.

To be clear - it’s dirt cheap. But still, it’s money, and it begs the question – do we need it?

Reddit functioned for years without a built in photo option. People typically used imgur.com.

But wait! Maybe there’s another option?

We might be able to keep photo uploads, but it will be temporary. Your nice photo will be deleted from our server after X amount of time. It’ll stay long enough for people to enjoy it, but if you try to find it 6 months or a year from now, you won’t have any luck.

Does that sound like a reasonable idea to anyone?

There’s a tool that does this, but I haven’t tested it. I’m not even sure if it’ll work, but before I look into it I want to gauge how people feel about that approach.

So, let us know!

  • Keep it the way it is?
  • Auto delete after X amount of time?
  • Disable uploads?

Let us know!

-walden

  • djundjila@sub.wetshaving.socialM
    4·
    6 months ago

    Among the options you mentioned, I’d prefer to keep it the way it is (keep pictures forever), or disable uploads (less desirable).

    I hate the auto delete idea because it’ll mess up old posts.

    • walden@sub.wetshaving.socialOPM
      2·
      6 months ago

      Yeah, that would be ideal. In the words of OutKast:

      Yuh
      Uh-huh

      Even the Sun goes down, heroes eventually die
      Horoscopes often lie
      And sometimes, “Y”
      Nothing is for sure, nothing is for certain
      Nothing lasts forever, but until they close the curtain
      (Y’all know)
      It’s him and I: Aquemini

      I would expect photos uploaded to enterprise type services (Google, Amazon, etc) to be stored for 30+ years, but even Imgur went through a “cleanup” where photos not linked to an account were deleted. It’s sort of the same here, because we don’t have a tool to tell us which photos were uploaded by our users, and which ones are federated. I DO think that info is in the database, it’s just a lack of tools at the moment.

      The only way for a user to even find the photos they uploaded is to scroll back through their post history, or keep a log of the URLs as they upload them.

      Here’s some fun reading: https://tech.michaelaltfield.net/2024/03/04/lemmy-fediverse-gdpr/