Hi all, We will be attempting to migrate Pict-rs tomorrow starting at 1700 UTC. Between now and 1700, image uploads will be disabled to try and avoid any data loss. You will still be able to like, comment and post until then. During the upgrade window, Pict-rs will be offline, so viewing images might not work. In theory CloudFlares CDN cache should cover us during the window, but YMMV. Hopefully everything should go smooth, but we do our best to make sure we have backups!
You can monitor our site health at https://dash.lemmy.world and https://status.lemmy.world
We will post updates to https://mastodon.world/@LemmyWorld as well.
Cheers, LW Infra Team 💗
Update This change is done. Images are now hosted on S3 storage and uploads are re-enabled.
Is this migrating from pict-rs to object storage or upgrading pict-ra from 0.4 to 0.5?
Object storage. Sorry if that was unclear ❤️
Ah nice congrats on the move
Thanks! It’s a lot of work for the behind the scenes stuff, but we have a great team that really cares 👼
Where can I read more about why this is happening?
Actually 2 reasons why. First and most important, this was needed so we can use tooling to detect and remove CSAM material. Secondly, it’s because this is more cheap and scalable than having it on disk.
Thank you for doing what you do.
I’ve heard that being a content moderator is absolutely soul-crushing work. Here’s hoping the new tooling lets you automate away the worst of it.
I have no insight into why it’s being done in this instance, but object storage is typically used when you want to move away from storing things on your web server with “fixed” storage, and instead store it in an “infinitely” expandable storage system. It is also much easier to manage when you have multiple servers as it’s separate and shared.
Right on. This seems relatively important considering pict-rs is the lemmy default. Seems like a change that should be considered for the core repo.
The problem with making S3 config the default is that it would add friction for new admins. If you’re just starting to play around with self-hosting Lemmy then it’s 100% certain you have a local disk but not nearly as likely that you’ve got an S3 bucket ready to go. Making S3 the default would force those new admins to either tweak their configs or figure out how to get an S3 bucket before they could get going. Using local disk for images is fine for smaller instances and self-hosts, but for cost and scaling reasons having an option to switch to S3 is really valuable for larger instance like lemmy.world. Only the top 10-20% of instances are likely to really need to make the switch to S3, so Pictrs defaulting to local disk makes sense I think.
While I agree on the technical aspects, I’ll say that small instances benefit a lot from s3. My single user instance currently has over 25 Gb of media cache… Object storage (hosted on my NAS ) has been a godsend.
Have you used MinoIO? I’ve used that before for local S3 and it works quite well.
This is actually what I use. Great piece of software!
What kind, or host?
That we moved to S3 from filesystem
Right, but you said not AWS so I’m curious what either cloud-based S3 service, or baremetal appliance / stack you’re using with S3.
Curious as well. Could be Cloudflare R2 since they said they’re using Cloudflare elsewhere, and it has zero egress fees. Or something like Minio. Obviously just wild speculation on my part.
Almost seems like he’s being cagey about not answering for some reason