Hello, fellow lemmings!

As I promised in my previous update, lemm.ee has enabled support for image uploads for all images up to 100kb! First and foremost, this means that you should now be able to upload avatars for yourself and your communities.

Why only 100kb?

From discussions with other instance admins, I have learned that one of the scaling issues so far with Lemmy is multimedia storage. Several instances report growing their storage by significant amounts daily - if we grew at that same pace, I would start seeing increased infrastructure bills very quickly (within months, if not weeks).

This is why I am hoping to keep it under control by limiting the upload size and asking users to use external image hosting providers as much as possible for now. I will keep monitoring our storage growth, and if it turns out that it’s manageable, then I will gradually start increasing the upload limit.

100kb was specifically chosen as it SHOULD cover most needs for any avatars, and possibly even simple banners for communities. I’m definitely open to feedback - please let me know if there are any specific cases where you desperately need a bigger limit!

Other updates

  • I have noticed some CPU usage spikes in our hardware monitoring, especially during the last 24h, so today I upgraded our servers to be a bit more beefy. My goal is to pre-empt any noticeable slowdowns, so if I do my job right with upgrades, you guys will never even know that there was a problem. If you do ever notice significant slowdowns, please always let me know directly and I can take a look!
  • Several people have kindly signalled their willingness to share the infrastructure costs of this instance. These people would enable us to grow much more without running into budget constraints, so I am planning to investigate what my options are for setting up a system of donations within the coming days. Thanks a lot to everybody who has messaged me about this!
  • Bill@lemm.eeEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This makes total sense, but will you be revisiting this limit? Maybe when you meet a certain donation threshold? Unless mobile apps build in native support for using external image hosts using an external host will always be difficult for mobile users. Thanks.

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I would love to increase the limit for supporters of the server. It requires some backend changes, but I am planning to look into it within a few weeks.

      • zeus ⁧ ⁧ ∽↯∼@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        maybe it’s a dumb question, but is there a way to create an avatar or banner for a community without uploading it to lemm.ee? or delete old images that i’ve uploaded but have been superceded? i don’t want to clutter the servers unnecessarily, but i can’t see any way around that?

        • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          There is no way to host avatars or banners elsewhere. But these are not a huge deal anyway at the moment, as they’re only up to 100kb each.

          It’s possible to delete images right after you upload them (a box pops up with a delete link), but there’s no way to delete them later for now. It’s something that could be added in a future version of Lemmy, though.

  • ing@lemm.eeEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    A perfectly acceptable amount of kb to enjoy my PC98 images. Thanks!

    Edit: Now how about a favicon for lemm.ee? ;)

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Edit: Now how about a favicon for lemm.ee? ;)

      If anybody wants to create some nice looking and simple icon for this instance then I would be happy to use it 😄

      • Prefix@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        I am not a designer, but I threw together something quick :-) also have higher quality SVG versions if interested!

        Lemm.ee 1

        Lemm.ee 2

        • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Hey, not bad! Unfortunately, Lemmy crops any icons into a circle, so these get cropped a bit too much. But if you make one that fits inside a circle, I’ll put it up.

  • RoosterBoy@lemm.eeEnglish
    01·
    1 year ago

    Yay, an upload limit I can’t even attempt to use because of that json error still being there!

    • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      If you’re getting an error while trying to upload a sub 100kb image, then something is wrong! Let’s figure it out, can you share two things with me:

      1. Is there any specific part of the website where the image upload is failing? Your avatar, a post, something else?
      2. Can you share the specific image that is producing an error? You could send it to my e-mail at image.problem@lemm.ee
      • fouc@lemm.eeEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Same problem trying to upload a 17 kB avatar

        SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON data

        • sunaurus@lemm.eeOPMEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I think I found an issue and fixed it for now - give it another go and let me know if it worked.

      • RoosterBoy@lemm.eeEnglish
        01·
        1 year ago
        1. Everywhere, avatars, posts, even in this comment section.
        2. It’s any image, I will email you a screenshot of the error when I get back to my PC

        This might just be a problem with Jerboa, Lemmy’s mobile app.