I am the admin of the newly created instance https://indie-ver.se/, and it’s been going great. But as I was looking to migrate all images to a S3 bucket, I noticed, the images take up more space than I had anticipated, a bit over 1 GB. And I know for a fact, that there has not been many images uploaded to this instance directly.
My best guess is, that it’s because lemmy by default creates local thumbnails for external posts, via. the setting “image_mode: StoreLinkPreviews”. Lemmy does allow me to disable this behavior, i.e. it would not cache the thumbnails on my instance, and instead have browsers request the image from the other instances.
The question is, what impact would that have on my users, and what impact would it have on the fedi-verse in general? I believe it would save me a lot on future storage costs, but I don’t know if it’s worth it.
- ssnoer


As @[email protected] said, just disable it. There’s very little benefit and huge (financial) dowbside.
Yeah storage is cheap, but S3 cache costs are also like the #1 thing people hosting Mastodon complain about.
If you’re privacy conscious and worry about IP leakage… then install a camo proxy. Done. That also solves the CORS issues.