I'm not sure how long it took, but for a while the instance had crashed. For some reason the Lemmy photo upload service took up 150GB of free space and hence the server crashed because of it. I'm not sure about the possibility of recurrence as I don't know the exact reason.
For this reason, you can follow our Mastodon account, which I have just opened, to follow or report possible crashes.
https://mastodon.world/@lemmynsfw
Cost is always a thing. Like if you are going to have big files, than your backup is going to be big backup too. Copyright is also important. There may be a need for an offshore server as there is a risk that the entire site will be shut down due to a random Onlyfans user's lawsuit. Things get complicated when Lemmy gets involved. I don't really know if Lemmy can handle that much media.
Anyways, I'm really not sure. All will become clear this month hopefully.
Thank you for your support! Hope we don't need it for a while :)
The image server for Lemmy is called pict-rs and is really well made. Imo Lemmy stops scaling before it. You can configure it to use object storage (Amazon S3) for example, which is probably the cheapest option to store a lot of data right now.
Pict-rs integration hard-coded into Lemmy backend. So I can't use object storage right now unfortunately. I wish I had that option.
Pictrs itself seems to support S3 as a backend. I think they're talking about that.
https://git.asonix.dog/asonix/pict-rs#user-content-filesystem-to-object-storage-migration
Yeah I asked this on lemmy repo after this comment. It seems like I really can switch to object storage with release candicate right now. There is 130gb of free storage on the server so I will wait for stable version until it fills up. Hopefully they releases stable in the mean time.