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?
Maybe have users use an outside image provider, like imgchest or gfycat or whatever?
This is the best idea in my opinion. Even on Reddit people used Imgur a bunch. It would be cool if either Lenny itself, or the various apps that have sprung up tied into an API for Imgur or similar to store pictures/videos, then it would be seamless to the end user.
EDIT: looks like Memmy on iOS actually already does this!
Gfycat is shutting down, sadly. There’s no money to be had in hosting pictures and videos for other sites that are viewed without ads. We already saw the Imgur clamp down a month or so ago. If these instances can’t self host the content it’s all going to have an invisible expiration date.
The issue is that if they shut down or change policies we get bit rot. Idk though it’s starting to sound pretty good.
I was wrong about what gets cached: media that is hosted directly on remote instances is not cached, while media from outside sources (imgur etc.) is cached and served from that cache.
So, from a small instance’s point of view, the best case scenario would be if everyone used Lemmy’s own media hosting exclusively. But that would, of course, greatly increase the storage requirements of larger instances.