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!
How can I post images hosted on external services?
For posts, just submit the image URL directly (in other words, copy the image URL into the “URL” field of the post you are creating).
For text posts and comments, you can use the following syntax: , for example  results in:
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
well that was specifically why - i had a large banner that has to be very jpeg compressed to fit under 100k, and i might want more similar in future. i do hope managing ones own uploaded images is a feature at some point; in general i try to host off instance to save you money though
thank you for the response