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: , for example  results in:
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!
I would love to start my communities here, but they revolve mostly around pictures, and I’m worried about impacting their experience. I hope this gets another look! Maybe something like S3 Glacier could work? I know pctr-rs supports S3, so it would hopefully be painless. Thanks for your work on this instance & Lemmy in general.
We are already using object storage for images actually 😃
I think creating communities resolved around pictures is totally fine, as you can post pictures from external hosts like imgur, postimages and many others - Lemmy will happily display these images inline.
By the way, Glacier is not suitable for hosting images on Lemmy, it’s intended for files which are accessed very infrequently.