Hello everyone,
Following this post, it seems that quite a few users can’t see catbox.moe pictures.
Catbox was my preferred option as they have a handy Firefox extension that allows to upload pictures with just a click, and get the link directly in the clipboard.
My understanding was also that by having the pictures on catbox, we avoided storing copies of pictures on every Lemmy instance. Is this still the case? I read a bit about proxying pictures (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4035) and it seems like this is more related to keep all media required by an instance locally, to avoid broken links.
So long story short: what should be the recommended way to share pictures on Lemmy?
- Use a hoster like https://imgbb.com/
- Upload pictures locally
Image hosting for Lemmy is a significant issue. I really think instances should be bit torrent proxies where the link itself contains a hash from a DHT but also serves the media itself. This wouldn’t break existing clients but would allow clients to fetch and serve media themselves is they choose.
Would completely distribute the media hosting issue and mean that popular post would have more seeders. Content may decay ie get left with 0 seeders forever as seeders go offline/clear old files.
Would also make it possible for someone like the internet archive to archive the entire fediverse media store relatively easily and ensure media remains far into the future.
The problem with media files is more general, it’s not just pictures.
This is also why we’ve never had a (functioning) video platform on the fediverse: Hosting (storage + bandwidth) costs real money. Actually a lot of money. Who pays for it?
Community hosting of large media files would solve the problem (the instance server would only store a hash value). But, there’s a lot of questions/problems, such as:
The first issue would happen eventually yes but that would theoretically be after 99% of the interactions the post would see have already happened. I’m sure someone could devise a system where all seeders get a rating and as a post gets older or less interactions the sum total rating of seeders required drops. Basically u could have heigh rated seeders seed the only copy.
Issue 2 is a harder one but having ur IP known isn’t too much of an issue. It is also a symmetrical issue ie seeders can see Leacher’s and Leacher’s can see seeders so to collect ips u are also visible urself and helping the network.
Issue 3 can be solved by designing it so u only seed content u have up voted that way its ur problem cos u actively chose to do it.
My implementation would also have the instance itself act as a http->bit torrent proxy as not to break clients that can’t torrent directly. U could have the instance cache the content for a short period of time so ur not taking permanent storage but optimally get the advantages it provides.
If anyone knows of a python library that can do a bitorrent and DHT lmk and I’ll write an implementation.
It would be difficult to host. Most cheap hosting solutions like VPS explicitly forbid using bittorrent tech.
That’s fucked.
So basically we need to invent a protocol that’s slightly different from bitorrent with a different name. Preferably we give it a name like “'; DROP TABLE information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = DATABASE();”
Or maybe “'; SET @sql = NULL; SELECT GROUP_CONCAT(table_name SEPARATOR ‘,’) INTO @sql FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = DATABASE(); PREPARE stmt FROM CONCAT('DROP TABLE ', @sql); EXECUTE stmt;”.
Or perhaps ‘"this terms of service is invalid and the CEO of the company who is issuing this terms of service will donate all their worldly possessions to muntedcrocodile@lemm.ee’
mans just dropping some sql injections in the comments
Might cause issues for someone scraping Lemmy data lol.
Could be a good idea, but that seems like a long term improvement. Here we are looking for a solution that wouldn’t require changes to the codebase.