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?

  • DandroidOPEnglish
    24·
    1 year 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·
      1 year 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·
      1 year 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.

      • 0xc0ba17English
        11·
        1 year 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·
      1 year ago

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