Selfhosting lemmy with no pictrs

Dandroid@sh.itjust.works to Selfhosted@lemmy.world – 112 points –

Hi all. Due to the news of the illegal images being hosted on lemmy, I shut down my instance. I read some comments from people stating that they were able to selfhost lemmy without pictrs, they just can't upload or cache photos. I think this is what I am interested in doing at this time.

I tried commenting out the pictrs section of my docker-compose.yml and removed the "depends on pictrs" sections. However, I get the error message in the attached screenshot when I go to my page.

Does anyone have any info on how to selfhost lemmy with image hosting completely disabled?

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I agree! Or let us disable caching images from other instances. I'm not interested at all in rehosting images that other users on other instances upload. That's too much of a legal liability to me.

Same thinking here. Caching media pretty directly undermines any Safe Harbor protections you have running a site, not to mention the resource overhead required.

I don’t understand why lemmy caches photos in the first place? Like surely it’s quicker, easier, and lower bandwidth to just store a url to the original source.

Lower bandwidth for who? When images are cached on other instances, it allows two things:

  • Load sharing. The original instance doesn't have to serve the whole fediverse, but only its own users + 1 request per other lemmy instance.
  • Data availability through redundancy. If the original instance goes down, the cached image is still viewable on other instances.

Bandwidth was the wrong choice of words. Storage space is more what I meant.

My primary consideration is all the expensive storage filled up by vapid image macros. 80 GB goes a long way for just text.