Image hosting is expensive, so I was wondering what is the financial situation like, and how can we keep this “crucial” (obviously) instance alive.
Thanks for your generous opinion. I also think that donations are necessary for the future, if not for now. I am looking for a platform that will be both transparent and anonymous. I may post a post about it soon.
Maybe there is a way to buy unlimited storage on a cloud storage provider and the admins could configure it as the instance storage, it will cost but I believe the benefit will be bigger and most cost-effective than using traditional storage or a VPS. Easily donations from users can sustain the service I guess.
There might be a way to point media post assets to an s3 bucket on the backend and have that hosted somewhere with cheap storage like Backblaze, but I definitely doubt that’s been built out yet. Though I admittedly haven’t looked through the code at all.
In Linux private servers there is a way to mount a cloud storage drive as a local drive and then(i think) there should be a way to encrypt the whole database and upload it there.
The biggest problem i see in running Lemmy instances it’s about storage, everything else could be done with a small home device like a raspberry pi.
Yeah that probably could be done on the server itself, depending on how the media is split up on the filesystem. Say for instance the
/app/mediadirectory is an s3 bucket mounted on the host. Might present some performance problems with doing it that way though.I checked my options and decided to use Cloudflare R2 for this. Lemmy currently supports S3 but is unstable. I’ll wait for it to become mainstream.
Also, I don’t believe it is stable enough to mount S3 to the folder with Rclone.
I haven’t waded through the config to look yet, but glad to see you found something that works for your instance. Lurked your profile a bit (sorry) and saw that pict.rs was able to point to object storage, did you end up doing that already?
Nope. Right now the pict-rs version that supports S3 is not stable yet. I tried to migrate on staging server tho. It worked there. I’ll migrate as soon as pict-rs goes stable.
Nice! Looks like the new version will solve part of the storage issue once it drops. I’ve also been reading reports of “database bloat” but have very few details to go on. Have you been seeing any other storage related problems besides media?
