In the future we’ll have flying cars and images will be stored long-term as Dall-E prompts, and will be generated on demand. Future archeologists will never know why people posted so many pictures of cats with weird limbs
AI compression? Yeah, probably
Flying cars? Not a chance
yes but no.
The instances have some fairly big servers, but yes, if everyone started posting a lot of images, it would eat up a lot of server space, and I think Lemmy.world had a lot warning notice recently requesting users avoid uploading them to they didn’t fill up and break the server.
It’s probably one of the biggest mistakes that Reddit made, in addition to hosting video. Hosting and serving images and video is expensive.
One thing I personally recommend is uploading high resolution pictures to services like Imgbox instead. This could mean they’re deleted after a few years, but the filesizes are just too big for most Lemmy instances.
Smaller pictures like screenshots, memes, reactions, should be easier to handle locally.
I’ve been uploading to Imgur still. Not a perfect solution, but I feel like it’s better than blowing up the Lemmy instances.
Depends on the instance, some are well-prepared and can expand storage depending on the traffic, so I think they’ll be fine. People are already posting a lot of images, but it is a good idea to try and link to other sources rather than stress the servers.
In a perfect world Pixelfed would be tightly integrated with Lemmy and Mastodon. Pixelfed is the Fediverse’s image sharing platform.
I tried posting a picture from Pixelfed to Mastodon several months ago and it was not integrated at all. I went back to uploading directly to Mastodon.
But what does that solve? That only puts the burden of paying for storage and bandwidth on the pixelfed instances.
That’s the idea longterm. There just wasn’t that much interest in integrating all the different platforms until recently. Each fediverse platform was a niche one oriented around small groups.
The admin of https://sh.itjust.works informed a few days ago when they had about 1000 users, that storage demand was considerable. People were posting 20 gigabytes per day.
@myersguy@lemmy.simpl.websiteWaiting on GIF playback…. uh for reasons
As someone hosting their own instance, I’m actually super interested to see how it all plays out.
I feel like that’s a massive hurdle for proper scaling to overcome. One of the reasons FOSS platforms can never supersede the others
