Asklemmy

43803 readers

770 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

107

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

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

55 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Booty@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. It's also a tremendous waste of resources. I'm all for redundancy (like CDNs), but this seems incredibly poorly thought out. If Lemmy (as a whole) every scales to the size of other social media, the space requirements will start to become unreasonable.

Why wouldn't something like symlinks be implemented? Not saying specifically use symlinks, but there has to be a similar, better way.

[–] laenurd@lemmy.lemist.de 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The obvious way would be to just not cache content locally and always link to the source instance. While this would concentrate the strain immensely, it would also greatly decrease the storage space used by all other instances.

There might also be other viable alternatives such as using a CDN and having it selectively cache content which is requested often etc.

~~As of now, Lemmy does not support either, though. ~~

Edit: I want to clarify that I was partially wrong - Lemmy only locally caches content which is hosted on outside sites. It does (should?) not cache content that was directly uploaded to a Lemmy instance and just embeds the source media.