Hi guys!

This weekend we will move lemmy.today over to using object storage for images. We will be serving images from Amazon S3 in the Oregon region (western USA).

The way lemmy software is designed right now, it caches every image federated from other instances. So even if we are small instance, we still have to store a lot of federated images locally on our disk. This leads to disk space running out quickly and we previously had to delete images because of this.

When we delete images, it removes not only those cached images but also user profile icons and banners, as well as community icons and banners. This is why we have some missing images under Communities right now, and also why users have lost their profile pics.

Its been very embarrassing to have to do this, and now we will move to object storage to prevent this from happening in the future. Its much cheaper compared to ordinary disk space and gives better performance for users, so its a win-win. We just need to do a one-time migration over to it.

**Estimated downtime hours: **

Oregon time: Sunday 3 am - 6 am

CET: Sunday 12 pm to 15 pm.

If you have any questions, you know what to do. :)

EDIT: Looks like it went well and images are now served from S3 instead of filling up our disks. :) The url to the images still looks like they are served by the instance, but thats by design appearently. In the background, they are fetched from S3.

Please fill free to re-upload any banners, user avatars or community pictures you had in place before that may have been broken by the disk cleaning before.

• When you do, you have to create a new picture with a new name for Lemmy to actually replace the image. Otherwise it wont work - ive tried myself. :)

Hi everyone,

As part of cleaning old cached images when the disk went full, it seems also images like your profile picture and banners (if you had those), got deleted.

If you dont mind, would you upload those again? And when you do, you cant upload the same picture. I made attempts myself to upload the same picture, but it needs to be a new picture (not even a rename of the pic works).

Next time I will make a DB query to figure out what pics are local and which are not, and delete only remote ones (cached images from other instances). There is a column in the DB for that, so just need to export a list of remote images and then delete only those.

Despite these growing pains, I think lemmy is still pretty awesome, and there will be tools to make these sort of issues go away in the future. I hear they are working on something for next version already so we will see.

Anyway, enjoy the weekend and once again, sorry for the mess around this issue.

Hi all,

The disk on the instance ran out of space today, due to the way Lemmy software caches images from all other instances. That cache had filled up about 60 GB's of disk, despite us being a small instance with very little local activity.

I had to delete the last 10 days of cached images again, and I plan to delete quite a lot of older cached images as well. The mobile apps seems to not be affected by this (they have a local image cache I believe), but on the web site, this leads to missing thumbnail images.

They are working on a fix for this in the Lemmy software so the disks dont fill up so enormously with cached thumbnails, and as soon as its out, we will install it here.

Hope you guys didnt get too annoyed or sad by the instance being unavailable for a while.

Some bots posted lots of illegal pictures in the https://lemmy.world/c/lemmyshitpost community, and because of federation, those pictures have spread to all instances, including this one.

The lemmy software doesnt have good moderation tools for abuse like this, and the quickest way to get rid of them was to delete all cached images for the last couple of days.

You may see some thumbnail images missing in the web interface, but I personally dont see any missing images in my mobile app. I guess it has its own thumbnail cache.

These ones have been added:

• https://old.lemmy.today/
• https://photon.lemmy.today/
• https://m.lemmy.today/
• https://alexandrite.lemmy.today/

People like them on lemmy.world so didnt want them to missing here. :)

We need a health checker for this health checker, ok?

Can someone rewrite this in Rust? :P

I noticed that the web interface sometimes didnt show all pictures when doing a full reload of the front page. This has been fixed now. It was related to some custom security settings I added last week, and I didnt notice the problem since i use mobile apps myself. But for everyone who uses the web interface a lot, this must have been annoying and has been fixed.

I added some themes for people who use the web interface. Some are pretty nice I think:

Modern Light:

Hanubeki Cold

Hanubeki Mint Alt Lt

And others.

How to use

• After you switch to a theme and save your settings, its really important to reload your browser cache, otherwise the theme will look wonky.

• Do this by holding shift and clicking the Reload current page button in your browser. (or press Shift-Control-R if you are on firefox)

New version of Lemmy just got released by the devs. :)

I plan to wait a few days before I upgrade the instance, just to make sure there isn't any weirdness being discovered. It's a small bug fix release so nothing major.

Link to the announcement: https://lemmy.ml/post/3021118

How is the instance performance for everyone? Just wanted to ask so there is no weird things going on.

If you notice images are loading slowish, it's because of how Lemmy software works. Images are stored on the instance where they were created, so if they were created on Lemmy.world and they are slow, you may see them loading slower here as well.

But the text content should be really fast since it's local on the instance.

There are people joining every day but we are still small, and if there is a need for more performance, I will upgrade the instance. Right now it looks like things are humming along fine.