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?
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work in progress
Awesome! Thank you for this link!
Just a note that my PR there doesn’t disable pictrs for your own instance’s users. It just disables the caching of remote content.
That’s fine with me, as I’m the only user in my instance.
Though I do still think this is a huge miss on pictrs to not allow the admin to browse the photos stored on their own server. I mean, someone could upload an illegal photo, not post it, then send the URL that only they could possibly know to whichever relevant government agency anonymously and potentially ruin the life of the admin.
Thank you so much for contributing and making this much needed fix.
Pictrs should have been an optional microservice by default. Commenting here to keep track of this thread since this is useful.
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.
Same thinking here. Caching media pretty directly undermines any Safe Harbor protections you have running a site, not to mention the resource overhead required.
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.
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.
Wants to remove pictures from his own Lemmy, asks for help with that via picture on Lemmy
You could just set the upload limit to 1kb?
The caching is probably the problem, not the uploads on a personal lemmy instance.
I wrote a patch for Lemmy a week or so ago if you want to skip the caching: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3897
I hope this gets merged soon. Saves us on storage space and makes monitoring media uploads easier.
