Thank you for pointing that out. I’m not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there’s no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there’s always costs built in somewhere.

What would an IPFS solution look like here? That’s a genuine question. I don’t have much experience with IPFS. It seems like it isn’t really used outside of blockchain applications.

They grew there

For sure, I’ll add it to the list. :)

The Lemmy server config indicates that is an optional setting to improve user privacy so requests don’t ever hit the original server from the client. Those cached files are only temporary and will be deleted after some time. So it’s not really full blown duplication.

The default setting is to only generate the thumbnails and store those locally (indefinitely?) but even that can be turned off. I checked and it appears that lemmy.world has the thumbnail generation disabled so all images from other instances just link to the original on that instance.

Are the images duplicated when shared? My understanding is that only a link to the file is replicated across servers and duplication comes from users manually uploading the same file to another server.

My website does not do any deduplication at this time.

Yeah, I wish it could be cheaper but I’m not a corporation. Instead I’m dependent on them to make a simpler product.

The target audience is certainly not developers because they can jump through the hoops to setup their own S3 + CDN or similar.

Somebody actually did make this as a joke years ago haha https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs

Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)

Jortage is a really interesting approach. It definitely helps reduce the impact of the file hosting problem but it doesn’t fully address the underlying cost issue. The cost of storing files grows every month indefinitely while donations typically don’t.

I would like to see a file hosting pool come to lemmy though. So I will look into it. :)

The files are uploaded to two separate S3 buckets. One is backed by Wasabi and the other is Backblaze. So if one fails, randomly bans my account, etc then I can switch the primary to the other and setup another mirror afterwards.

Compute is hosted by fly.io and the CDN is bunny.net