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.

  • rezzEnglish
    7•3 months ago

    Where can I read more about why this is happening?

    • RuudMA
      17•6 months ago

      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.

      • @QuetzalcutlassEnglish
        9•6 months ago

        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.

    • @misterbassmanEnglish
      8•6 months ago

      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.

      • rezzEnglish
        8•3 months ago

        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.

        • @countvon
          8•6 months ago

          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.

          • Magnor
            6•6 months ago

            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.

            • JelloeaterAEnglish
              4•6 months ago

              Have you used MinoIO? I’ve used that before for local S3 and it works quite well.

              • Magnor
                2•6 months ago

                This is actually what I use. Great piece of software!

                  • Magnor
                    2•6 months ago

                    And surprisingly light on resources (apart from storage space obviously).