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?

  • eleitl@lemmy.mlEnglish
    42·
    10 months ago

    Pictrs should have been an optional microservice by default. Commenting here to keep track of this thread since this is useful.

    • Dandroid@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      22·
      10 months ago

      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.

      • yukichigai@kbin.social
        10·
        10 months ago

        Same thinking here. Caching media pretty directly undermines any Safe Harbor protections you have running a site, not to mention the resource overhead required.

      • knoland@kbin.social
        7·
        10 months ago

        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.

        • 0xc0ba17@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          11·
          10 months ago

          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.
      • eleitl@lemmy.mlEnglish
        3·
        10 months ago

        My primary consideration is all the expensive storage filled up by vapid image macros. 80 GB goes a long way for just text.