hitagi

https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs/src/branch/main/pict-rs.toml

pict-rs has the option to compress images. Ours is set to WEBP with 1280 pixels either side max.

I don’t remember which update it was but newer versions of Lemmy use significantly less database storage.

I recommend checking out lowendtalk.com if you’re shopping for VPS hosting providers.

I’m sure the original spirit of selfhosting is actually owning the hardware (whether enterprise- or consumer-grade) but depending on your situation, renting a server could be more stable or cost effective. Whether you own the hardware or not, we all (more or less) have shared experiences anyway.

Where I live, there are some seasons wherein the weather could be pretty bad and internet or electricity outages can happen. I wouldn’t mind hours or even days of downtime for a service whose users are only myself or a few other people (i.e. non-critical services) like a private Jellyfin server, a Discord bot, or a game server.

For a public Lemmy server, I’d rather host it on the cloud where the hardware is located in a datacenter and I pay for other people to manage whatever disasters that could happen. As long as I make regular backups, I’m free to move elsewhere if I’m not satisfied with their service.

As far as costs go, it might be cheaper to rent VMs if you don’t need a whole lot of performance. If you need something like a dedicated GPU, then renting becomes much more expensive. Also consider your own electricity costs and internet bills and whether you’re under NAT or not. You might need to use Cloudflare tunnels or rent a VPS as a proxy to expose your homeserver to the rest of the world.

If the concern is just data privacy and security, then honestly, I have no idea. I know it’s common practice to encrypt your backups but I don’t know if the Lemmy database is encrypted itself or something. I’m a total idiot when it comes to these so hopefully someone can chime in and explain to us :D

For Lemmy hosting guides, I wrote one which you can find here but it’s pretty outdated by now. I’ve moved to rootless Docker for example. The Lemmy docs were awful at the time so I made some modifications based on past experiences with selfhosting. If you’re struggling with their recommended way of installing it, you can use my guide as reference or just ask around in this community. There’s a lot of friendly people who can help!

Matrix but then I realized I only used it for the bridges so now I use Beeper instead. RIP my Matrix server which only served two people.

I really want to say Gandi but they charge too much now and removed the free mailboxes.

Anyway, I’ll vouch for Netim. Their prices are similar to (old) Gandi and they have a mailbox too. I’m looking into Spaceship for some other domains because they’re really cheap.

I’m not from the US and I tried requesting for one (NCMEC credentials) and this is what they told me:

if your company or site is located internationally, we are unable to register you at this time

The CSAM scanning tool didn’t require NCMEC credentials back then. At least that’s the context I’m getting from this short thread in 2021.

I also tried looking into other tools like PhotoDNA but it also isn’t available in my country.

edit: just to add, the blog post you linked is old (2019). They changed the UI. If you log into the Cloudflare dashboard, it looks like this:

And yes, they do require a 30 minute Zoom call according to the email exchange I had with the NCMEC.

They are. We’ve manually removed these images from our instance (and are following the guidelines provided by local laws).

I hope this gets merged soon. Saves us on storage space and makes monitoring media uploads easier.

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/3897

It does say “thumbnails” but as far as I know, Lemmy (or pictrs) makes a copy of the full image too. I don’t know if this PR includes full images.

images hosted on the same server as the federated community will directly link

https://ani.social/post/288601 - This image is uploaded from a user on the same instance as the federated community (lemmy.world) but the image is cached.

images uploaded somewhere other than the federated community will be copied into cache

https://ani.social/post/285354 - This image is uploaded from a user on a different instance (lemm.ee) from the federated community (lemmy.world) but the image is not cached.

The behaviour is pretty weird. Hopefully we can disable image caching/copying-over-locally so we don’t have to deal with problematic images hosted by other instances.

You can refer to this post. The full image is copied to my instance (and transcoded). Not just the thumbnail.

Not just the thumbnail. The full image is cached. There’s a PR request to disable thumbnail caching but not the full image.

It’s pretty inconsistent from my experience. Sometimes images do cache and sometimes they don’t.

edit:

Here’s an example from my instance:

https://ani.social/post/284147 - JPEG image that isn’t copied/cached by my server.

https://ani.social/post/285861 - WEBP image copied/cached by my server.

Images do sometimes. At least in my instance they do. See this post for example. There’s a local copy stored in my server.

edit: I’m running pict-rs 0.4.2

How did you check this? From my understanding, images from external servers are copied (and transcoded) over locally. At least in my server (running 0.18.4), they do.

Might this be related?

In some cases, pict-rs might crash and be unable to start again. The most common reason for this is the filesystem reached 100% and pict-rs could not write to the disk, but this could also happen if pict-rs is killed at an unfortunate time. If this occurs, the solution is to first get more disk for your server, and then look in the sled-repo directory for pict-rs. It’s likely that pict-rs created a zero-sized file called snap.somehash.generating. Delete that file and restart pict-rs.

https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs#user-content-common-problems

I’m using Netim right now for my personal domain. They’re a bit expensive (similar to Gandi’s old prices) but it does come with email which is nice.

My favorite r/selfhosted comment.