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
I would love to start my communities here, but they revolve mostly around pictures, and I’m worried about impacting their experience. I hope this gets another look! Maybe something like S3 Glacier could work? I know pctr-rs supports S3, so it would hopefully be painless. Thanks for your work on this instance & Lemmy in general.
We are already using object storage for images actually 😃
I think creating communities resolved around pictures is totally fine, as you can post pictures from external hosts like imgur, postimages and many others - Lemmy will happily display these images inline.
By the way, Glacier is not suitable for hosting images on Lemmy, it’s intended for files which are accessed very infrequently.
Ooh, maybe that’s why the banner upload didn’t work for me.
Oh hell yes, avatars!
A perfectly acceptable amount of kb to enjoy my PC98 images. Thanks!
Edit: Now how about a favicon for lemm.ee? ;)
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 😄
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.
Wasn’t sure if they’d get to editing it, but I took their idea and swapped the eyes for ee’s
Looks great! Applied it to the website, favicons should be updating soon.
Thank you very much for your contribution!
Tbh this is even worse than the default lemmy icon. The e’s as eyes don’t work at a smaller size at all. Also should be using svg.
Personally, I think it looks pretty good, I like that it’s similar to the default but at the same time different thanks to the black nose!
But if our community grows a bit bigger, then I wouldn’t be against organizing some democratic logo contest, where users could submit their creations and the community could vote on a winner.
Yay, an upload limit I can’t even attempt to use because of that json error still being there!
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:
- Is there any specific part of the website where the image upload is failing? Your avatar, a post, something else?
- Can you share the specific image that is producing an error? You could send it to my e-mail at image.problem@lemm.ee
Same problem trying to upload a 17 kB avatar
SyntaxError: JSON.parse: unexpected character at line 1 column 1 of the JSON dataI think I found an issue and fixed it for now - give it another go and let me know if it worked.
- Everywhere, avatars, posts, even in this comment section.
- 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.
Fantastic news! Appreciate all the hard work and transparency, @sunaurus@lemm.ee!
I think 100k is more than reasonable for the time being.
I’m also interested in chipping in to help with hosting costs, so please do share when you have a system in place for that! :-)
I hope they someday increase the size limit to 200 kb it’s annoying because most of the profiles I have are just barely over 100kb and If I compress them any further they look grainy and awful.
