I’ve been considering self-hosting for over a year now, but I’m still concerned if the feds will come knocking at my door for something someone else does.
For example, if someone on my server follows an individual or community and they posts something illegal (i.e. unauthorized sexually exploitive images) that content could be stored on my server. Wouldn’t’ I be legally liable for such?
I mean #fucklaws and everything, but I don’t want to end up in a cage and certainly not for something someone else did.
I believe the Pictrs is a hard dependency and Lemmy just won’t work without it, and there is no way to disable the caching. You can move all of the actual images to object storage as of v0.4.0 of Pictrs if that helps.
Other fediverse servers like Mastodon actually (can be configured to) proxy all remote media (for both privacy and caching reasons), so I imagine Lemmy will move that way and probably depend even more on Pictrs.
I’ll have to double check this but I’m almost certain pictrs isn’t a hard dependency. Saw either the author or one of the contributors mention a few days ago that pictrs could be discarded by editing the config.hjson to remove the pictrs block. Was playing around with deploying a test instance a few days ago and found it to be true, at least prior to finalizing the server setup. I didn’t spin up the pictrs container at all, so I know that it will at least start and let me configure the server.
The one thing I’m not sure of however is if any caching data is written to the container layer in lieu of being sent to pictrs, as I didn’t get that far (yet). I haven’t seen any mention that the backend even does local storage, so I’m assuming that no caching is taking place when pictrs is dot being used.
Edit: Clarifications
It seems to work, but it keeps throwing pictrs related errors, so it’s not really built for it
Well that’s disappointing. I’ll have to investigate further I guess. I was really hoping to set it up (at least initially) without any type of media storage.