no, a random image I just now check was 3.3mb even. But you’re right, the image source does point to the origins server location… Then why are all those images stored on the server ?

When I look on my server in the volumes/pictrs folder, there are a LOT of images that I recognize from my feed. They are not from posts posted to my server but belong to posts of communities that I have subscribed to

only pictures and posts that the instance-member are subscribed to, and from the moment they interacted with it. But yes, I’m curious to see where this goes.

I noticed it when I was looking in the database and disk on my instance, where there are already thousands of posts and more then a thousand images - while my own instance only has a couple of posts and images

lots of traffic on many small files eventually uses more disk space and bandwidth. Depends on the growth of the instance

yes. running a server costs money. I have lemmyfly.org running just 2 days now on digitalocean using a cheap 1GB ram, 25GB diskspace and 1000GB bandwidth for $7,- a month. Storing images on the server will eventually take up all space and bandwidth meaning you have to upscale -> pay more.

Using a different location for storing images and/ or videos is best to offload the instance !

yes, they are hosted on the server that is running the Lemmy instance. But every other instance that is linked to that instance will ‘scrape’ all posts incl images and store them on they’re own server. So posts and images are served from the instance you yourself are a member of

I do, and looking forward to contribute. I’m not a UX designer though…

it definitely needs some UX attention