Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.

There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

  • hendrik
    link
    fedilink
    English
    312 months ago

    A lot of pictures and memes get posted here. And every other post shows a thumbnail picture. These images are all files.

    • @tehn00bi
      link
      English
      132 months ago

      Not denying that. But maybe we should accept that photos and memes and whatnot aren’t that valuable and limit their size or the volume allowed per user. Just a thought.

      • hendrik
        link
        fedilink
        English
        10
        edit-2
        2 months ago

        Yeah, I wonder if that would fly with the users. I just scrolled through my timeline and nearly every post has some colorful image to it. (except in Ask Lemmy and No Stupid Questions.) I’m not sure if users would accept this platform if it were mostly textual. And putting restrictions in place would certainly reduce the number of images. Scrolling through Lemmy would feel like Hackernews, not any modern social media platform. I doubt mainstream people appreciate that.

        But yeah, that’d be possible. We could just close the meme communities for example. Or exclude them from individual instances to save some space there.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        42 months ago

        limit their size or the volume allowed per user

        Fedi software like Misskey already did exactly that. Each user have limited “drive” which can be upgraded/customized per user. People even reuse image they already have on their drive, so it won’t be any duplicate files.