Hi all,
TL;DR at bottom
Tonight I've noticed some issues loading images. Any images already proxied work fine, but new images were failing to load at all. Not sure how long it's been happening for today, but this led to a pretty shit experience browsing Lemmy 🫤
You might not be aware, but most images are run through the proxy at lemmyNZ so that when you browse, you're only loading images direct from Lemmy (other than a few exceptions, such as imgur, which blocks this and is also commonly used).
The main benefit to this is privacy. Without it, images are loaded direct from the site. This means as you scroll your feed, all those sites know you specifically (or at least your IP address) are seeing their content in your feed on Lemmy. By proxying the images, only LemmyNZ is seen as the one loading the image then it passes it on to you.
Lemmy does support only proxying thumbnails, so other sites are not called unless you click on something, but for some reason Lemmy NEVER deletes the thumbnail, and your storage just fills up and up with no way to clear it.
So tonight I've been trying to troubleshoot. I have upgraded Lemmy to the latest version (relase notes for 0.19.17 here, and 0.19.18 here. Only minor changes), updated the image version to the latest version, and restarted everything a few times. As of writing it seems ok, but I do want to know people's thoughts on this.
Do people like to have the images proxied so sites aren't tracking them? Or should we prioritise stability, where images are more likely to load consistently and have a better browsing experience if we load them from the site directly?
If the image proxy stays stable going forward, we could still consider an exception for images loaded directly from other Lemmy instances, which could reduce load a bit while still protecting from most tracking.
It's worth noting if we want to move off Cloudflare, not proxying much will likely help with speed, but we'll also be loading a lot of stuff off Cloudflare still from the other sites using it. I say it will likely help with speed because images are currently stored in an EU data centre, they load relatively quick because Cloudflare caches more locally. If we leave Cloudflare then images may have a longer delay to load.
TL;DR Image proxy in Lemmy has been unstable tonight so you might have noticed not being able to see any images. Curious on people's thoughts on continuing to use it:
- Keep proxying as much as possible even at the expense of some failing images
- Proxy most content but add some exceptions for content loaded direct from other Lemmy instances, and some common big image hosts
- Proxy nothing
- Other
Thoughts?