- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.world
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Another issue is that image storage is a huge resource burden, to the point where instance admins will simply purge images periodically to keep their database at a reasonable size. It seems like every time I look at Lemmy posts older than a couple months, the images are broken.
I’m not convinced image support should be built into Lemmy in the first place. Back on Reddit, people relied on external image hosts like imgur for many years, and those worked a lot better than the image system Reddit eventually built in (which is covered in wall-to-wall anti-features like the inability to load a goddamn image directly).
We saw what happend with that when imgur and a gif hoster (forgot the name) decided that the free loaders are occupying too much space.
Suddenly the archival troops backed several TBs from imgur.
gfycat
Yeah, that was certainly not ideal. This is a problem with centralization more than it is with integration. I’d rather see a separate decentralized image hosting service. I feel like an image host and a link aggregation/discussion forum require different skills to develop and run, and it would probably be best to have something more specialized.
I agree with this. Also Lemmy likes to reformat images when you upload them. Its stupid. I have to hotlink from elsewhere anyway so yeah removing it makes more sense.
It would also help reduce the proliferation of things like CSAM thus reducing admin overhead.
My instance went down for almost 24 hours yesterday and it’s really small, and I post so much I was actually worried I broke it by just using it too much. I don’t wanna suck up all of Wander’s storage space. 😖
Images should be stored in a distributed storage like the IPFS.
The lemmy devs should really focus on proper content deletion tools. It’s not just the images, it’s very strange and inconsistent overall. When I delete a comment, it’s seemingly still visible to many people and collecting up/downvotes even many hours after I deleted it. On the other hand, when a post gets deleted, it’s completely gone, to the point that I can’t even look up the discussion that I had within that post, just my own comments on my profile.
It’s always only had a handful of real devs dedicating time to it. A whole site like this is kind of a huge undertaking, especially when you’re deciding to build it from the ground up in a modern language like Rust, and on top of a relatively new API set, ActivityPub.
Even from early on, I remember lots of discussion from people with database management credentials who were basically pounding their heads going “why are you guys doing it this backwards way?” I don’t follow the development super closely so I don’t know if those issues were resolved or not. I just remember a lot of discussion on it when I was first on Lemmy on a different instance.
Anyway, the short point of what I’m saying is they probably have a plan that makes sense to them, but without more external poking on certain things, they will work on what they think is important first, which may not always line up with what the community thinks is important.
Once again, it’s a handful of folks doing front-end-dev, back-end-dev, database management and admining a very large instance.
I don’t follow the development super closely so I don’t know if those issues were resolved or not. I just remember a lot of discussion on it when I was first on Lemmy on a different instance.
not that i’m aware of, and fixing a database schema once it’s already in place tends to be a clusterfuck so i’m very skeptical it will get better any time soon
Deletions shouldn’t be difficult because of the schema. For instance, this query:
select display_name, ('https://your.lemmy.host/pictrs/image/' || pictrs_alias) as image_url, pictrs_delete_token from image_upload iu inner join local_user u on u.id = iu.local_user_id inner join person p on p.id = u.person_id;will list all media, with the display name of the user who uploaded them, and the token that can be used to delete the image. Obviously, this needs awhere u.id = ?parameter to only expose the list to the right user, but adding a “delete old media” page really shouldn’t be that hard. It’ll require time, though, and with one of the two devs taking parental leave soon, I don’t think there’s that much dev time for a while.The pieces are almost in place, they just need an API endpoint and some UI work.
That query by itself in a vacuum is fine. Combined with many other triggers on the DB, and then federating that out before actually deleting from the local DB… well that is what creates all sorts of headaches.
Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work. Best you can do is delete media for deleted posts.
The API call for deleting media already exists. It’s actually used in the comment compose screen (you can click the “click here to delete” popup after uploading media). So all you need to do with this info is send a POST request to the existing API endpoint.
I don’t think the Lemmy database uses triggers on media uploads at all, I don’t think Diesel support those well?
Images aren’t federated through ActivityPub so I don’t really see how deleting media is supposed to work.
Yes, they are. Every instance downloads everyone’s images for a “cached” version that is currently never used. This is what makes this problem especially insidious and straight up dangerous in cases like CSAM.
Clicking delete on one server does not magically delete content on other servers, federation needs to happen first and there’s usually a queue for that. If the delete command hasn’t reached remote servers yet, those servers will receive upvotes, downvotes, reactions, you name it. Your local server will likely refuse most of those, but other servers who have a copy of your comment will have a differing local state until the delete request makes it over. If your server, or the remote server, is slow for a while, federation can take minutes to hours to complete.
Not only that, I can restore your deleted comment/post on my server and start commenting on it. My comments will only show up locally on my server, but funky deletion behaviour is just one of the ways Lemmy and centralised platforms differ.
On most servers, the post table is a lot smaller than the comment table, so even on your local server the delete button may take a moment to work, though I wouldn’t expect that to take too much time.
I’m not sure why your deleted stuff is still collecting votes, I think the server should be refusing those. Maybe there’s a bug somewhere?
And even if you delete a comment the API will still provide the message content as due to federation shenanigans it’s actually just hidden. If you need to remove something, edit and redact the message first.
“Tools for moderating IMAGES now?! When will you beehawists stop with the entitlement?!?!” -lemmy devs, probably
Beehaw isn’t updating their Lemmy install anyway, so it’s not like adding new features for Beehaw users would solve anything.
Beehaw isn’t the only instance of Lemmy, nor the only instance in the Fediverse. Sure, the feature being added to Lemmy now, won’t benefit Beehaw. But it would still benefit others. Refusing to work on the features that Beehaw wants out of spite, will definitely hurt other instances too.
Not my circus, not my monkeys
The comment I’m responding directly references beehawists.
Of course others will benefit, but specifically for beehaw this isn’t very relevant.
users can’t delete images
Not until the next major release of Lemmy, unless you click the delete button before the image gets posted, or if your app stores the delete token (there is at least one Android app that does this)
admins can’t delete images
They can, if they read the manual. Mods can’t, but instance admins can.
They can, if they read the manual. Mods can’t, but instance admins can.
Yes. If you use arcane commands using the docs that are in a pull request that is not yet merged. This is not accessible to many instance admins and it is only “technically supported” which is the worst kind of support from my point of view.
It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.
We’ll get our delete screen eventually. It’s already a work in progress. If you’re desperate for the functionality, you can merge the PR and build the server already.
Given that the developers have publicly stated that there should be tons of instances run by anyone, pushing that much responsibility to admins with command line access is only asking for problems.
It’s a basic curl command, that shouldn’t be “arcane” if you’re setting up a server.
This is the equivalent of saying that any instance admin needs to know how to use curl while most people have never used a commandline. Not only that but you need machine access to know the api key which I would wager instance admins do not necessarily have.
I think this is the result of not prioritising work that makes moderation possible by non-technically inclined people and it is genuinely a failure of the system.
The priorities of development on Lemmy are decided by developers and the people who are not are simply pushed away. Most community leaders and moderators are not developers. The mental gymnastics to justify this lack of tooling is tiring.
Doing manual curl calls is hardly an alternative for proper GUI, but the way the article is written makes it look like there’s nothing you can do when someone uploads an image to your server. That just isn’t true.
Server administrator can delete media, either by extracting the user delete token from the database or by using the privileged API. That’s not an alternative to a proper moderation API but it’s also not the “uploading is a black box that glues the files to your server” that people pretend it is.
And to be honest, if you’re going to run a server like this and don’t know how to do these tasks, I’m not sure if hosting a publicly accessible service is such a good idea. Not because this stuff is common knowledge, but because web services are complex and come with all kinds of ethical and legal implications that you need to know how to handle. We don’t want the Fediverse to become like email, where 99% of IP-addresses are blocked because it was so easy to just leave an ancient piece of software running with no real understanding of the abuse it could cause, whether that’s an SMTP server or an open MissKey server (see: the Japanese spam wave).
In my opinion, Lemmy’s lack of moderator tooling is a serious deficiency that puts it squarely behind Mastodon and a bunch of other Fediverse tools. However, there’s no way you only discover this stuff months later. The sad fact is that Lemmy is one of the better Threadiverse server implementations despite its many glaring issues.
What I’m seeing around Lemmy is a lot of complaining about priorities but not a lot of community action. Mastodon had the Glitch fork, Kbin had Mbin, but nobody bothered to fork Lemmy to fix the issues they care about. Instead, it’s all about “the two lead devs need to focus on what I find important”. Suggestions to work on the project and fix the issues are deflected by things like “I don’t have time/don’t know Rust”, which are perfectly valid reasons not to help, but also don’t make your problem the devs’ problem. There’s a real sense of entitlement coming from these blog posts for a platform whose top 4 contribution statistics look like this:
I too have too little time to fix the issues I have with Lemmy, but I accept that instead of assuming the issues I’m facing need to be prioritised. If Lemmy’s priorities are that starkly different from mine, I’ll need to migrate to something else. I don’t get to decide what does and doesn’t appear on the roadmap for the next release.
Lemmy should have better mod tools, and they’re coming eventually. I’ll just wait for the devs to get around to implementing them.
Unless I’m reading it incorrectly, the devs changed tact and this was already fixed 2 weeks ago
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/issues/2384#issuecomment-1978857727
I would personally love it if apps would allow images on posts that have been flagged to appear blurred prior to admin review, or just to have a blur applied to all images unless you hover over it/hold your finger on the image.
I know I saw one vulgar troll post that I could’ve lived life without ever seeing.
Admins can’t delete images
They’re the only ones who actually can delete them! Unless somehow they don’t have access to the systems they host their instance on, which would be bizarre.
Yeah, it does read like a hit piece.
E: I read the GitHub thread, my god… the entitlement… yeah that’s not how open source software works. Heavy Karen vibes from the feature requester.
TIL it’s entitled to ask that software you use is either compliant with the law or clearly lets you know that it isn’t, especially when the developers have no idea what the law is
It’s not entitled to ask, politely.
Open source software is collaborative, community effort. Everyone contributes what they can and are willing to. Contributing a bug report is one example. Submitting a patch is another. Donating a sum of money to someone to submit a patch is yet another. There are others.
It’s entitled to demand that the developers of an open source software do anything they’re not willing to.
Let alone trying to shame them into doing it on social media if they refuse.
Let me give you an example. I could publish some work I’ve done which is 100% legal in the US. Other US citizens might find it useful. Say this software conrravenes some law in Europe that I am completely oblivious of. Someone comes to GitHub and demands that I commit some amount of time to make it compliant. I have no such time to spare. I’ll suggest you or someone else submit a patch and I’ll merge it. The end.
this issue is similar to images drag and drop in GitHub readme.
