I just triggered the lemmy community seeder. The hope is that this will make sure we don't miss out on popular content from other instances just because no one from our instance is subscribed to the right community.

It will run on a schedule so if new communities are made and start getting popular it should also pick those up and start putting posts in our All feed.

If the All feed gets terrible, and especially if you see stuff that shouldn't be there, let me know. I can unsubscribe the account from that community, though of course anyone can subscribe to communities themselves so remember you also have the ability to block a community.

If your account isn't on lemmy.nz, ignore this message 🙂

[–] absGeekNZ 5 points 1 year ago

Thanks for your continued good work on this.

[–] d3Xt3r 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks for this, I normally browse by all/new and have noticed there's a big difference in what I see here v/s my account on lemmy.world.

I'm curious though how much of an increase in storage/bandwidth this would cause.

[–] Dave 3 points 1 year ago

I'm curious too!

I was having a chat with one of the devs yesterday (on lemmy, so I guess you could find it in my post history). They realised that thumbnails are not resized at all. Thumbnails are generated when content is federated, and stored in full resolution. So even if no one looks at it, it's stored. And the thumbnail cache never expires.

Currently the image cache in total is 137GB (based on last night's backup), and has images from June when the instance started.

The image storing component pictrs has no ability to resize images, so looks like resizing isn't coming any time soon (it would be good to have to help thumbnails load faster). However, the next major update, lemmy 0.19 and pictrs 0.5, will have the ability to set a time limit on the cache (or even disable it completely).

If we aren't even resizing the thumbnails then perhaps having the cache disabled would be appropriate, though I had planned to set it to a few days or a week. In either case, there should be a dramatic drop in the size of the cache once that update is out.

A smart person may have waited until that was available before triggering the seeder, but I just saw the tab that's been open for weeks and decided to just get it done while I had the chance.

[–] NoRamyunForYou 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Seems to have made a big difference!

Thank you for that :)

[–] Dave 2 points 1 year ago

Glad to hear it!