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?

  • eleitl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    30·
    1 year ago

    Pictrs should have been an optional microservice by default. Commenting here to keep track of this thread since this is useful.

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      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.

      • yukichigai@kbin.social
        8·
        1 year ago

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

      • knoland@kbin.social
        5·
        1 year ago

        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.

        • 0xc0ba17@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          10·
          1 year ago

          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.
      • eleitl@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

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

  • Norgur@kbin.social
    153·
    1 year ago

    Wants to remove pictures from his own Lemmy, asks for help with that via picture on Lemmy

  • Lung@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 year ago

    Yeah it’s been obvious and foreseeable that normal admins won’t have the bandwidth to handle takedown requests and cp spam attacks. Sadly the only stable state I see for the fediverse is relying on centralized content hosts that can handle those problems. Well, maybe until AI can do it