Disclaimer: I wrote this article and made this website.
There was some talk of this issue in the recent fediverse inefficiencies thread. I’m hopeful that in the future we’ll have a decentralized solution for file hosting but for now I deeply believe that users should pay for their own file hosting.
Is file hosting really a must? I mean Reddit and feddit are basically forums. And not many forums allow file uploads. Also, we should have retention limits. Low value posts are allowed to fade away. High value posts that have some level of interaction stay alive longer.
Reddit is basically entirely image or video posts, all hosted by reddit directly.
A lot of pictures and memes get posted here. And every other post shows a thumbnail picture. These images are all files.
Not denying that. But maybe we should accept that photos and memes and whatnot aren’t that valuable and limit their size or the volume allowed per user. Just a thought.
Fedi software like Misskey already did exactly that. Each user have limited “drive” which can be upgraded/customized per user. People even reuse image they already have on their drive, so it won’t be any duplicate files.
Yeah, I wonder if that would fly with the users. I just scrolled through my timeline and nearly every post has some colorful image to it. (except in Ask Lemmy and No Stupid Questions.) I’m not sure if users would accept this platform if it were mostly textual. And putting restrictions in place would certainly reduce the number of images. Scrolling through Lemmy would feel like Hackernews, not any modern social media platform. I doubt mainstream people appreciate that.
But yeah, that’d be possible. We could just close the meme communities for example. Or exclude them from individual instances to save some space there.