I am the admin of the newly created instance https://indie-ver.se/, and it's been going great. But as I was looking to migrate all images to a S3 bucket, I noticed, the images take up more space than I had anticipated, a bit over 1 GB. And I know for a fact, that there has not been many images uploaded to this instance directly.

My best guess is, that it's because lemmy by default creates local thumbnails for external posts, via. the setting "image_mode: StoreLinkPreviews". Lemmy does allow me to disable this behavior, i.e. it would not cache the thumbnails on my instance, and instead have browsers request the image from the other instances.

The question is, what impact would that have on my users, and what impact would it have on the fedi-verse in general? I believe it would save me a lot on future storage costs, but I don't know if it's worth it.

- ssnoer

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[–] ssnoer@indie-ver.se 3 points 1 month ago

Well. You probably want some pictures. For a site icon, for your pfp etc. which necessitates setting up the image server. You can quite easily stop your server from caching external images, as I’ve just done, so only your local images are stored. I don’t know about disallowing user uploaded images entirely. Maybe you can set an upload limit of 0 or smth?