Not a lemm.ee user, but here's my thoughts on #2 since it affects me via federation:

I am not a fan of how Lemmy chose to implement image proxying Specifically, federating the proxied URL.

That frequently prevents my instance from fetching a thumbnail locally (option 1 above). Which, ironically, increases the load on your server as my instance has to fetch it from your proxy every time instead of just once to generate a local copy here.

From a UI development standpoint, the proxied thumbnail URLs also make it harder to detect the image type (gif, static image, video) to handle rendering. It also complicates other proxying/caching methods I have in place. Ultimately, in the UI I develop, I've had to resort to passing thumbnail images through a function to un-proxy them so they can be handled sanely.

So I generally wish that admins avoid Lemmy's proxying until it no longer federates the proxied URL and does something sane like just return that for the local API calls.

No opinion for the moment, but thank you for the very detailed post

Storing permanently locally doesn't sound like a good solution..

If you could adjust the length of time to keep cached/proxy'd images locally and increase it significantly, I'd think that would be the preferred solution.

I'm on a lot, and I scroll from All/Hot. I rarely see broken images. They do pop up, but not enough to ever bother me. The only option I'd avoid is method 1, because of that image debacle a few months ago. Regarding methods 2 and 3, they both seemed to work fine. I leave it to smarter minds than myself.

Good work on next, btw. Enjoy your weekend and thank you for everything you do!

I say option 3. Sure, it's annoying, but that's our problem. Your problem is keeping the server operational, safe, and low-cost.

Considering the vote:content ratio, it looks like most users spend most of their time spectating. The spectators feed our egos and determine the trends in content by singular positive or negative votes. The spectator experience seems far more important to me and it should be the onus of the contributors to ensure their own privacy, just like they do in avoiding doxxing themselves via text.

Option 2 certainly follows in the vein of improved performance, but if real-world implementation is proving too unstable or creating too much overhead, then I say "fuck it, option 3 sounds great."

Option 3 is the only one that seems sustainable long term. Donations will NEVER keep up with user growth, thus storage costs will balloon out of control.

Completely avoiding any chance of illegal content touching the servers should immediately have everyone agreeing on this option. I doubt anyone here is willing to foot legal bills and as such even minor legal actions would be the end of this instance.

Privacy is nice but ip logging is the simplest form to "protect" against with even a free VPN. If those claiming privacy concerns here aren't already using a VPN and are depending purely on lemme.ee's proxy then their internet hygiene needs an update.

As for usability, the image being deleted from external provider presents the same issue to the user between option 2 and 3. The cache from option 2 will inventually get cleared and it'll fail to pull a fresh copy if deleted from the external hosts.

Thanks for your hard work as always.

I'm in favor of moving away from proxying. Too many images break and proxying in general is very wasteful, having to download images from potentially small servers constantly would definitely get you ratelimited.

Passing through external images is OK. Many people often post external links anyways to sites like imgur and catbox because of the file size limits anyways.

I think the end goal would always to store images locally though - or at least caching them for extended periods of time. Don't large instances like Lemmy World and huge Mastodon instances work this way? How do they manage the risk?

I like 3 also. if you can't get a good user experience privacy matters less because there are no users, and anyone can spin up a super privacy enhanced instance if they want.

I was thinking however that a super stand alone image server would be a great thing for Lemmy, and pixelfed and the Fediverse in general.

Imgur blew up and was the go to for image hosting on Reddit for years, until Reddit realized it was leaking traffic and users to them and started their own. But hosting images has a lot of potential headaches like copyright violations and big corps suing you into oblivion, in addition to inadvertently hosting illegal stuff. The Fediverse will need some good image hosting servers and video hosting servers as part of the plan in the long run though.

Have you thought about solving this issue in the front end? The client I’m using (Mlem) implemented a feature to directly access the image if the proxy fails. This feature can either be triggered automatically or by pressing a button on the failed image. This allows users the benefit of the proxy while also having the option to give up their IP if they want to see a broken image.

I believe just passing through external images is the way to go, it's always the one I opt for if I can

Hosting those images is gonna get expensive and that kinda sucks for a donation run platform when that money could be far better spent elsewhere

I think also using external image sources is more in line with the idea of decentralisation, Lemmy isn't an image host it's a link aggregator and forum - I believe most image hosting sites will be far better at loading images quickly than Lemmy's implementation could ever be

Definitely OK with either option 2 or 3. And I trust @sunaurus to choose what's best for this instance.

I would pick image pass through because I'm not necessarily concerned about the image hoster logging my IP. I have been more frustrated with broken links, so I am very much opposed to the current method.

2+3: Try to fetch image, if you get it proxy it, if your storage gets full use LRU eviction, once evicted or some amount of time has passed delete it and don't fetch again, ever. Fall back to pure 3 if there's ever any issues with anything, including you not particularly feeling like implementing smart caching: Our referrer privacy is not your responsibility.

I think it's important for us to be mindful of content retention for posterity's sake if we want Lemmy to compete with Reddit long-term. If possible, I'd hope we can avoid dead image links like we see with old forums and photobucket pics, for example.

Option 3.

Images have been a bit problematic for me lately, for sure. If storing them locally is not a solid option, the question I would have is how much of the other requests are proxied? As in, what other stuff apart from images/media is not being proxied? If the clients are leaking IPs anyway, maybe it's okay to have them download the images, too. But if the server is proxying everything else then having some sort of a cache might not be that bad an idea

Although I value privacy, I value sustainability more. Choose an option you feel most comfortable with, option which puts the least burden on your shoulders.

I’d lean towards option 3. I view this site as an aggregator and I see plenty of broken images when scrollling through here. It’s not your job to host or proxy those images and working in infrastructure it lends to a lot lighter weight instance that’s easier for you to manage without having to worry about disk, or even worse, bandwidth costs.

The only way I would see option 2 being more beneficial is if it was truly a temporary cache solution where the image gets pulled in 1 time, served out to all lemm.ee users for a period of time (say 24 hours). This would reduce the chance that you end up rate limited, while allowing users to still see the image served via lemm.ee

The proxy on every request solution just seems poorly implemented to me for the reasons you say.

The only issue I have is catbox being broken on my phone. If proxying fixes that then I'd support that one. We don't need to keep the image on our servers forever I think.

While it is a pain to upload to imgur and then post as a link, it's not that bad tbh. If there was some way to convert an uploaded image into an imgur link automatically to skip the middle man, that would be cool, but imgur might have something to say about that.

Of course there is the option to snail mail all our memes to sunaurus for them to scan and upload. That way if you wanna post something, it better be worth the printing, 10¢ of shipping, and 2 to 3 weeks of travel time. That would be a pretty solid filter system.

I think proxying is very important else anyone can simply upload an iplogger or possibly more advanced fingerprinting image. This in combination with observing federated actions will make it very easy to deanonimise almost every single user who interacts in any way even upvoting.

Can u simply increase the time period that nginx caches images for to avoid some of the rate limiting issues? Otherwise perhaps using proxy lists to proxy requests from lemm.ee to the image hosts is doable (im not sure about the legality of this tho).

Have u emailed the image hosts letting them know what u do and asking if they can remove ur rate limit (idk if they would be receptive to this without a financial incentive).

I am also in favor of option 3. Hosting images has a chance of hosting some csam and that might take you out.

Wow, thanks for the full transparency. You are awesome!

My opinion would be option 2 (proxy requests) , but with a higher cache TTL or simple a LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache.

If you're getting throttled, it could be mitigated by increasing the cache retention period (or improving the cache hits).

Another improvement : Would it be possible to change the proxy, so that if the proxied requests are throttled, it simply sends the user a http-302 to the origin (instead of a broken image)?

Regarding option 1 (full cache) : I greatly appreciate your desire to hide/protect your users ip, but it is outside the scope of what I expect from a Lemmy server. Maybe you could market and upsell this increased privacy as a subscription based feature. However, if I want privacy - I'll use a VPN.

Regarding option 3 (User fetches content from origin) : From a users perspective, I really don't want my Lemmy experience to be based on hitting a bunch of (potentially) unreliable services. When I, as a lemm.ee User, request a post from Lemmy.world (for example), lemm.ee will proxy and cache that post and the comments. This is the distributed nature of Lemmy (as far as I understand). Why restrict this caching to just posts/threads/comments and not include images (which, let's face it, are as meaningful as pure text - especially wrt memes).

I'd prefer proxying

While I appreciate you trying to make it so, my privacy isn’t your responsibility. Option 3 is the way to go to keep your costs down, which is the long-term best solution.

It wasn’t one of the options, but from a user perspective a hybrid solution is best. Making a local copy that has a 24-48 hour cache keeps your storage down but still gives us the benefit of option 1. But it sounds like this would require some changes to how the server software works, which would be cool, but again you shouldn’t feel compelled to attempt.

Keep your costs and stress low wherever possible and thank you for everything you do.

Whatever is most sustainable for you.

hmm maybe proxy or store it on a external cdn

well written with a lot of useful information!

The end user in me says pass-through isn't the best experience but for specifically Lemm.ee I think it fits. let a smaller or alternative instance do the local caching and assume all legal risk. let this one grow but at some compromised expense. since this is a free service, it is perfectly fine to pass those compromises down to end users guilt free.

Can you get around the rate limiter with something like proxy servers? https://dev.to/lordghostx/3-simple-ways-to-bypass-api-rate-limits-3de0

Option 3.

Privacy concerns aside, which I am willing to bear, Option 3 is the most sustainable option.

Looking at our status page, the projected monthly expenses is greater than the revenues. If passing through external images allows us to reduce operational costs and ensure lemm.ee's sustainability despite the loss of a degree of privacy, then it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.

Thanks, admins and mods, for everything that you do!

I'd say option 3. Personally, I don't care if random websites get my IP among a list of hundreds of others, and if someone wants to keep their IP hidden from strangers, they should be using a VPN before browsing the net anyways. It'd also be nice not to have to open another instance when I come to a post with a broken image that I want to see, but that's not hugely important to me.

If it were an instance specifically for privacy enthusiasts, that'd be a different story, but this is a general-purpose instance, and option 3 seems to be what's best for both general users and the server itself.

I'm a fan of option 3. For my past few image posts I've been using other image hosting sites like imgchest because my images won't upload.

I am very privacy oriented, and I am fine with option 3. Thanks for all you do!

I would prefer the option which allows lemm.ee to run in the most sustainable manner

No idea 🤷🏻‍♂️

Can Option 2 and 3 be bombinated?

Meaning the user gets the pass through image and automatically uploads it to lemm.ee for temporary storage

Just a “shower thought”

3 adding a security buffer to block IP address reveal.

I would do option 3, both as a user and if I were to make my own service. I'd let a dedicated image service do it. I'm not worried about IP leakage and if I am I can use a VPN. If I want to be that concerned about it, I think the responsibility is on me, not on the service unless they promise that level of privacy.

I vote for what gives the best experience for users and makes running the service easier and cost effectivem

Option 2 seems like the optimal idea, on paper, if Option 1 isn't feasible, but Option 3 doesn't really bother me, if there's trouble with Option 2's implementation. I don't consider privacy at an IP-tracking level really that much of a concern. This is a social media platform, my privacy is my anonymity.

It sounds like maybe Lemmy itself coupd use some enhancement with regard to how and when it decides to proxy, and what it does when proxying fails. If we can get a better experience by swapping to Option 3, until such enhancements are maybe made in the future, that sounds fair to me.