When an instance goes down, all of the images on it go with it. there’s going to be a lot from lemm.ee, especially given its size.

  • Goretantath@lemmy.worldEnglish
    41·
    3 days ago

    Images dont get saved locally on other instances if they host the content? Well that seems like a big flaw in “federation”…

    • kersploosh@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      18·
      3 days ago

      I assume it’s an intentional trade-off by the devs to reduce the storage burden. If each instance is a complete mirror of all federated instances then hosting becomes that much more expensive.

    • drkt@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
      9·
      3 days ago

      Instances have 3 options. Save it locally, proxy it, or do nothing. Saving every federated image is not feasible for small instances. It’s not a fault of the protocol that instance operators don’t want to pay a thousand dollars a month for storage. Matrix has this problem, and look what happened to them: tiny instances are expensive to run, so don’t flourish.

      • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        3·
        3 days ago

        no, I agree with the above user that it would be better to federate images too, for at least the following reasons:

        • redundancy: see the OP
        • privacy reasons: images loaded from other instances inform the other instance that one is viewing those images, do you trust all of them?
        • censorship reasons: some lemmy instances are blocked in my workplace and I can never look at images from them when browsing at work; others may be blocked in entire countries

        If I’m not mistaken, Mastodon already does federate images to other instances, so it isn’t unheard of.

        • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
          31·
          3 days ago

          I think they would need to find a way to address the problem first. Reportedly, these images have been a huge problem here on Lemmy. Several times now.

            • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
              0·
              3 days ago

              Same, same. I can’t verify it and I probably don’t want to. But I had people assure to me it happened.

              • scytale@lemmy.zipEnglish
                1·
                3 days ago

                That’s credit towards the admins who acted quickly. That’s why you’ll see instances defederate from an instance if their admin is not active and doesn’t take action against illegal content in a reasonable time, because it can quickly get out of hand. Now if content isn’t proxied and is always mirrored, not only will the admin have to defederate from the problem instance, but they will have to go and clean up whatever was copied on their instance as well.