Image uploads, "No pornography" rule and lemm.ee Growth
Image uploads, "No pornography" rule and lemm.ee Growth
Hello, fellow lemmings!
I have three updates regarding lemm.ee:
Image uploads
As some of you have already noticed, image uploads are currently not working on lemm.ee at all. The short explanation is that I have been trying to figure out the best way to enable image uploads without incurring big additional costs in terms of storage, bandwidth, and moderation.
I have come to the conclusion that initially, the most sustainable path will be to enable image uploads only for small images (<100kb) - this should be enough to allow folks to upload avatars for themselves and their communities, but it for sure won't allow uploading many bigger images or gifs for your posts.
For bigger images, I would ask everybody to use an external image hosting service for now, as was usually done on Reddit before they added image uploads.
I am in the process of creating a patch to the image upload code that will allow all Lemmy instance admins to configure a smaller limit on the uploaded image sizes. Once that patch is finished and accepted, I will be deploying it on lemm.ee - at that point, you will be able to finally upload avatars. Sorry for the wait, hopefully it won't be much longer!
"No pornography" rule
There is a new rule landing in your sidebar - "No pornography". I was initially against adding any too-restrictive rules, but after many discussions with other instance admins, I have realized that there is a big amount of additional risk to a community when allowing pornography.
As of writing this post, there are no pornography-related communities on lemm.ee, so I'm hopeful that this rule won't be too controversial. If you were planning to create such a community on lemm.ee, I'm very sorry to ruin your plans and I hope you can find another instance that is more suitable for your community.
Growth of lemm.ee
The rate of new users joining lemm.ee has certainly been much faster than I expected. For now, the growth has been sustainable, and we can still keep growing at this same rate for a while longer without incurring additional costs.
However, if this growth continues for an extended period of time, then additional costs will become unavoidable. At that point, we will have the option of either closing sign-ups to new users, or upgrading our infrastructure to allow continued growth. The latter can only be achieved through some kind of community funding, so I will be asking the community for input if that time ever comes.
I want to be clear about one thing: if we end up closing new sign-ups, then this will not close your communities to new members. As always, Lemmy users from any other instance will be able to subscribe to your communities on lemm.ee, they will be able to participate as normal and even become moderators. The only thing that will change if we close sign-ups is that new users will not be able to choose lemm.ee as their home instance.
That's all for now, let me know in the comments if you have any feedback or thoughts about any of this!
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Hey, thanks for creating the instance and keeping it ship shape!
Just a couple questions about timelines
When do you expect the patch for image posting might be done? - I'm not knowledgeable at all about any of this stuff, does the patch mean we'll be able to post images and they'll show up organically/embedded as part of the post? (As opposed to seeing a link to Imgur where you can't see the actual image)
Re growth of lemm.ee - How long would you expect the 'extended period of time' to be if growing rate stays constant? It's exciting to think we could be growing so much/fast!
Edit formatting
When do you expect the patch for image posting might be done?
I'm hoping during this week, but can't guarantee anything. I'll keep you guys posted.
does the patch mean we’ll be able to post images and they’ll show up organically/embedded as part of the post?
Yes, as long as the images are <100kb 😀
How long would you expect the ‘extended period of time’ to be if growing rate stays constant?
It's difficult to predict, as we've only been live for a few days, and there are many moving parts here. We have several pieces of our infrastructure which are being affected at different rates by the growth, and only time will tell which one gets close to the limit first.
For example, I am paying for:
- Storage for uploaded media
- Storage for the database (all posts, user data, comments, content from other instances, etc)
- Bandwidth
- E-mails
- Just plain server resources like CPU/memory for multiple servers
I'm keeping a close watch on resource usage for now, I'll definitely keep updating everybody as time goes by.
Yes, as long as the images are <100kb 😀
Ahh I see, I thought the patch would allow for bigger (say <3-5mb) images to be uploaded. Does that mean it's not in the plans at all to be able to have larger sizes uploaded?
If it seems like a 100kb limit won't make a dent on our infrastructure, then I'm open to increasing it, but it's something that will need to be monitored carefully. Unfortunately storage is expensive, so I need to be careful about this in particular.
What're your thoughts on using something like storj for decentralized data storage?
AFAIK storj has an s3-compatible API, and we're currently also on an s3-compatible service, so it shouldn't be very difficult to switch if necessary. But for now, I am quite happy with our service provider - it's one of the chepaer ones already (certainly far cheaper than AWS S3).