When you upload an image in the URL bar when creating a post, where does it go? Are they hosted on the respective Instance of the community?
When you upload an image in the URL bar when creating a post, where does it go? Are they hosted on the respective Instance of the community?
If you run the normal Ansible setup, there’s one docker container running pictrs that’s going to handle the image uploads. By default, it stores it into a volume that comes from the server’s filesystem. So when you upload an image, it gets stored to the server’s file system with the default settings.
Pictrs supports object storage, and you can get it to store the images to any S3 compatible storage.
Probably not a bad idea to enable S3 support
If you tend to upload images/memes etc., yes, it’s a good idea. And very cheap (read: free) if you go with Cloudflare R2…
I’ve never used CF for object storage, I personally use Backblaze B2, it’s pricing is extremely fair. If anyone needs object storage, it is something to consider, I am not sure how it compares to cloudflare though. There unfortunately isn’t much documentation on config vars for object storage on lemmy/pict-rs I am still looking into this.
For most of the self-hosters here, Cloudflare will be free. I know many Mastodon and Akkoma users using Backblaze, so it’s probably a good option too. I use it for my backups, and but not with their S3 API.
Btw, if somebody here makes an instance with pictrs sending data to S3, it would be really cool if you would document it and write a guide how to enable it with a common Ansible deployment. It seems that the docker image doesn’t take any environment variables, or at least there is no documented way how to turn on the object storage using the pictrs docker image. Maybe it’s not implemented yet, and somebody needs to fork the docker image…
I will update this thread if/when I find out more information regarding this.