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How does Lemmy/Mastodon/Fediverse store videos and images? (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago by Blurker@programming.dev to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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As I was browsing lemmy and the fediverse at large, this question kept popping into my head.

Since multimedia files have a much bigger footprint than raw text, it made me feel worried since as time goes, massive resources will be needed to keep up with the big data coming in.

I do wonder if the instances have taken the route of the cloud and just decided to put all of it in something like AWS S3? Or maybe they use self hosted storage with something like minio for object storage?

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[–] Booty@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I agree. It's also a tremendous waste of resources. I'm all for redundancy (like CDNs), but this seems incredibly poorly thought out. If Lemmy (as a whole) every scales to the size of other social media, the space requirements will start to become unreasonable.

Why wouldn't something like symlinks be implemented? Not saying specifically use symlinks, but there has to be a similar, better way.

[–] laenurd@lemmy.lemist.de 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

The obvious way would be to just not cache content locally and always link to the source instance. While this would concentrate the strain immensely, it would also greatly decrease the storage space used by all other instances.

There might also be other viable alternatives such as using a CDN and having it selectively cache content which is requested often etc.

~~As of now, Lemmy does not support either, though. ~~

Edit: I want to clarify that I was partially wrong - Lemmy only locally caches content which is hosted on outside sites. It does (should?) not cache content that was directly uploaded to a Lemmy instance and just embeds the source media.