this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2022
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How much of that is cached from federated instances though? I can hardly imagine a low-traffic community like that uploaded 1.6GB of their own images already. If it is mostly cached then that can increase very quickly as new users subscribe to additional communities on other servers.
Now you know why there needs to be a decentralized picture storage hosting that works for the web, in the same way torrents do for even larger data like video.
You have tons of servers hosting the exact same pictures needlessly while sharing none of the hosting costs.
That was the original idea of IPFS, no? Just that they pivoted now to trying to sell you filecoins :(
I'm not against including an ipfs layer in pict-rs, but the complexity would go way up. Federating an image between lemmy servers would require sending the ipfs uri between servers via activitypub, and then each receiving server sending that uri to pict-rs. pict-rs would then need to decide, on each server, if the ipfs-stored image matches that servers' image requirements (max filesize, max dimensions, etc), and if it does, then that pict-rs server would request to pin the image. I don't know exactly how ipfs pinning works, but ideally it would only be stored locally if it isn't already stored in at least N other locations. If the remote image doesn't match the local server's configuration, it could either be rejected or downloaded & processed (resized etc).
Serving ipfs-stored images that aren't replicated locally might also be slow, but I won't know for sure unless I actually try building this out.
How would federated posts look if the original server went down? Just a 404 not found on the picture and the discussion left intact?
This seems to be the case right now, yes.
The great thing is that deduplication would also be built-in with the IPFS layer, apart of the obvious advantages.