Hello, fellow lemmings!

As I promised in my previous update, lemm.ee has enabled support for image uploads for all images up to 100kb! First and foremost, this means that you should now be able to upload avatars for yourself and your communities.

Why only 100kb?

From discussions with other instance admins, I have learned that one of the scaling issues so far with Lemmy is multimedia storage. Several instances report growing their storage by significant amounts daily - if we grew at that same pace, I would start seeing increased infrastructure bills very quickly (within months, if not weeks).

This is why I am hoping to keep it under control by limiting the upload size and asking users to use external image hosting providers as much as possible for now. I will keep monitoring our storage growth, and if it turns out that it’s manageable, then I will gradually start increasing the upload limit.

100kb was specifically chosen as it SHOULD cover most needs for any avatars, and possibly even simple banners for communities. I’m definitely open to feedback - please let me know if there are any specific cases where you desperately need a bigger limit!

How can I post images hosted on external services?

For posts, just submit the image URL directly (in other words, copy the image URL into the “URL” field of the post you are creating).

For text posts and comments, you can use the following syntax: ![alt text](image url), for example ![lemm.ee logo](https://imgur.com/earIilI.png) results in:

lemm.ee logo

Other updates

  • I have noticed some CPU usage spikes in our hardware monitoring, especially during the last 24h, so today I upgraded our servers to be a bit more beefy. My goal is to pre-empt any noticeable slowdowns, so if I do my job right with upgrades, you guys will never even know that there was a problem. If you do ever notice significant slowdowns, please always let me know directly and I can take a look!
  • Several people have kindly signalled their willingness to share the infrastructure costs of this instance. These people would enable us to grow much more without running into budget constraints, so I am planning to investigate what my options are for setting up a system of donations within the coming days. Thanks a lot to everybody who has messaged me about this!
  • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    If you’re getting an error while trying to upload a sub 100kb image, then something is wrong! Let’s figure it out, can you share two things with me:

    1. Is there any specific part of the website where the image upload is failing? Your avatar, a post, something else?
    2. Can you share the specific image that is producing an error? You could send it to my e-mail at [email protected]
    • fouc@lemm.eeEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Same problem trying to upload a 17 kB avatar

      SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

      • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I think I found an issue and fixed it for now - give it another go and let me know if it worked.

        • nudl@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          lol, I was just going to write a comment on this thread and saw this message.

          They seem to be working now when they weren’t 5 minutes ago. (testing in this post too). Thanks!

    • RoosterBoy@lemm.eeEnglish
      01·
      1 year ago
      1. Everywhere, avatars, posts, even in this comment section.
      2. It’s any image, I will email you a screenshot of the error when I get back to my PC

      This might just be a problem with Jerboa, Lemmy’s mobile app.