if many people started posting pictures, wouldn't that overload Lemmy completely?

arisoda@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 29 points –
19

Depends on the instance, some are well-prepared and can expand storage depending on the traffic, so I think they'll be fine. People are already posting a lot of images, but it is a good idea to try and link to other sources rather than stress the servers.

As someone hosting their own instance, I'm actually super interested to see how it all plays out.

I think it just comes down to time. More users on a platform leads to more data, more bug reports, and overall more backend development. Since Reddit is quite old, they already have worked through those growing pains. Now its Lemmy's turn, and the more people that move over and use the platform, the more bugs and issues can be discovered faster, meaning more fixes can be tested and applied.

I feel like that's a massive hurdle for proper scaling to overcome. One of the reasons FOSS platforms can never supersede the others

In a perfect world Pixelfed would be tightly integrated with Lemmy and Mastodon. Pixelfed is the Fediverse's image sharing platform.

I tried posting a picture from Pixelfed to Mastodon several months ago and it was not integrated at all. I went back to uploading directly to Mastodon.

That's the idea longterm. There just wasn't that much interest in integrating all the different platforms until recently. Each fediverse platform was a niche one oriented around small groups.

For those admins still wondering take a look at how Mastodon did with the user explosion last year. I doubt the stack is that similar but I don't remember lots of instances going offline forever due to space constraints (alone). Some may have gone done to overall lack of resources but many are doing quite well.

But what does that solve? That only puts the burden of paying for storage and bandwidth on the pixelfed instances.

Waiting on GIF playback…. uh for reasons

I was surprised by the lack of gif playback too

Not just for the obvious 😉but also for just random funny videos, idiotsincars, combat footage etc.

Most of lemmy I can get on with. This is my personal biggest wish request

The instances have some fairly big servers, but yes, if everyone started posting a lot of images, it would eat up a lot of server space, and I think Lemmy.world had a lot warning notice recently requesting users avoid uploading them to they didn't fill up and break the server.

It's probably one of the biggest mistakes that Reddit made, in addition to hosting video. Hosting and serving images and video is expensive.

In the future we'll have flying cars and images will be stored long-term as Dall-E prompts, and will be generated on demand. Future archeologists will never know why people posted so many pictures of cats with weird limbs