On multiple occasions I've listened to instance admins speak about high S3 costs. The sheer amount of data absolutely balloons the more activity your server sees, I get it.
What I don't get is whether there's some unknown fedi ethical reason everybody insists on setting up an S3 cache (followed immediately by complaining about it).
Y'all want to know what the rest of the web does? Hosts their own uploaded media, and links out to the rest...
@devnull Short answer: My instinct is that you are correct in doing it for optimization reasons, though I think the optimization reasons extend slightly.
There's an assumption in the fediverse that we are single individuals acting individually. This is where the expression that there are no "servers" in ActivityPub comes from (I have opinions about this expression, but setting that aside).
So the assumption is that your system that served the media may not be always online. So there's a cache.
@devnull The small local server may not always be online, it may not be able to support Fediverse Load™, it may be flaky, etc.
Hosting it locally removes those as concerns.
I'm personally of the view that we should act more like the rest of the internet here and just work with links, however.
(I consider the "not leaking IP addresses" mostly a BS justification and that anyone who needs that really needs Tor and to not use most fediverse software already, but it does exist as well).
@devnull There is some argument to be made for doing it for the purposes of locality—for example if Alice's server is in the US and Bob's is in Singapore—but this extends to the entire internet and a better solution here, IMO, are CDNs (and it should be optional if we're going to go that route, and servers should be able to not have their media stored like that, etc).
@hrefna@devnull the real reason to do it is that it aligns instances’ hosting costs with the number of users they have rather than how popular their users’ posts get. Nobody wants their CDN bill to spike to an unplayable level because a big user retweeted one of their users’ posts. This is why cross linking images died elseweb as well. Ppl would just block the image once it got too much traffic and now your thing 404’s
That's a variant of what I already said in the second post: you have a theoretically more reliable connection to your local instance than to the remote instance, the remote instance isn't set for traffic, etc
That said, to the degree it is specifically about that cost, I'd argue that it's optimizing the wrong part of the problem. Or perhaps more accurate to say: optimizing a part of the problem with a niche use case when there are other concerns that need to be weighed.
@hrefna@kevinriggle Putting a CDN in front and taking the brunt of your local instance's traffic ought to be an expectation if you have the capacity to generate large volumes of traffic.
The rationale falls apart a fair bit when the amount of traffic most single-user (and low-user) instances generate to other instances is closer to a rounding error.
So my intention was to learn more (mission accomplished) but also to object to the blanket assumption that S3 is always necessary in all cases.
@devnull@hrefna@kevinriggle It's also about how much traffic other instances can generate to you. Even a tiny single user instance can see a huge amount of inbound traffic if someone like Gargron boosts one of your posts.
@FenTiger@devnull@hrefna@kevinriggle yeah this. Tiny single user instances shouldn’t bear the burden of someone else deciding to pay attention to them, the people with the attention (or their instances) should
@FenTiger@devnull@hrefna@kevinriggle one of many, many things we didn’t understand about the internet thirty years ago and had to learn repeatedly, face first
@FenTiger@kevinriggle@devnull@hrefna (if 1000 simultaneous hits takes down your web server what potato are you running it on and why are they even touching the database, c’mon man)