As I was browsing lemmy and the fediverse at large, this question kept popping into my head.
Since multimedia files have a much bigger footprint than raw text, it made me feel worried since as time goes, massive resources will be needed to keep up with the big data coming in.
I do wonder if the instances have taken the route of the cloud and just decided to put all of it in something like AWS S3? Or maybe they use self hosted storage with something like minio for object storage?
Everything. It does some re-encoding when it retrieves content from other instances and you can set limits for pictrs (the software Lemmy uses to host media) regarding file sizes etc.
I need to look more into pictrs and what it can do. Is this done on purpose for image redundancy? I get the reason if the original instance goes offline then I’d still have a copy but maybe I don’t really want a copy? Also would be nice if I could get it to convert everything to webp
I think by default it already converts everything into webp. The repo will have more information on how it all works.
When I was looking into hosting my own instance I thought I saw an option to disable media file replication entirely so that they would always have to be fetched from their home instance.