this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2024
404 points (99.8% liked)

Fediverse

28503 readers
311 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.

There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I'm hopeful that in the future we'll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Deebster@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Yes, for example go to https://infosec.exchange/explore

I see the top post as https://infosec.exchange/@nocontexttrek@mastodon.social/113433063621462027 and the image is https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/cache/media_attachments/files/113/433/063/582/671/258/original/71da3801e4e4f08c.png

The link is to the original on https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/433/062/676/773/993/original/f828afef5cc7ed1c.png but when you click image the javascript loads a modal with the local cached version (same image as the thumbnail that infosec.exchange loads.

There's lots of different codebases across the fediverse so perhaps some hotlink, but local copies is the default.

[–] sosodev@lemmy.world 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

The Lemmy server config indicates that is an optional setting to improve user privacy so requests don't ever hit the original server from the client. Those cached files are only temporary and will be deleted after some time. So it's not really full blown duplication.

The default setting is to only generate the thumbnails and store those locally (indefinitely?) but even that can be turned off. I checked and it appears that lemmy.world has the thumbnail generation disabled so all images from other instances just link to the original on that instance.

[–] Deebster@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Ok, so Lemmy doesn't cause the same amount of duplication, but I'd still argue that dedupe is valuable: it saves on hosting costs (your costs, in this case) and users will get a small advantage in having slightly higher cache hits.

[–] sosodev@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

For sure, I'll add it to the list. :)