A couple of days ago i noticed something off with blahaj.zone. I couldn’t see images posted by users on blahaj, so i thought it was a problem on their side.
Well guess fucking what? After 3 days, it was STILL broken, so i opened it and…
Blocked. They fucking blocked blahaj.zone. Actually beyond parody🤦♂️ Why? What was the point? there’s trans content literally everywhere on lemmy. what’s next, block them all? So now if i want to see a post by a user on blahaj, i have to turn on my VPN (protonvpn.com is also blocked in saudi, jfc) just to see it. Fuck this place. 🙄
I swear a couple of days ago it worked. This is a mild annoyance (hence the community) but still.
It’s so over guys, MBS said no more 196 😔
One of the first conversations I was on when I joined was one between Ada, the lemmy.blahaj.zone admin, and some guy in a Middle Eastern country. Apparently his country had blocked lemmy.blahaj.zone at the national network level.
The Threadiverse is federated, so one could view posts from lemmy.blahaj.zone elsewhere, but not images, which did not propagate.
I thought that at some point, lemmy servers had started also storing images posted on other lemmy servers, but upon checking, it looks like they have not. I did run into one – no longer up – that had, according to the description, had apparently been modified to do this, probably to afford its users more privacy and not expose their IP addresses other than to their home instance. In theory, if you could find one that did so, you could make that your home instance and just rely on propagation of images through the network.
EDIT: It sounds from this year-old post like a lemmy instance can at least be configured to cache remote images:
https://futurology.today/post/6440
I suppose it’d be possible to go look and find out exactly what the current situation is.
Some shitheads started to spam CSAM and it got cached on other instances too. db0 admin created a tool to check every upload via library of hashes of known dangerous images (not images themselves). Since then, most images are stored locally on instances and aren’t cached by others.
https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-06-07_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.4_-_Image_Proxying_and_Federation_improvements
Image proxy is what I suspect you mean. The problem with that from an instance admin is that on the network level it would them show their instance accessing whatever content their users request which then puts the owner at risk, so I believe most never enabled it. If an owner set up an instance with a particularly strong opsec game though where their outbound connections where routed over a VPN or TOR that could be useful to censored countries. Might make for an interesting project…
That’s not really the problem. The main issue until now is that when you try to proxy all images, what ends up happening is that a lot of popular image hosters start rate limiting your server’s IP, so your users end up just seeing a lot of broken images, and they think you misconfigured your instance. @sunaurus@lemm.ee had to deal with this iirc.
That too I suppose. I seem to recall the feature coming out not too long after all the CSAM issues, so liability for that always stuck in my mind.
Hmm.
IPv6 addresses are a far less-constrained resource than IPv4 addresses.
I wonder if it might be possible to do the requests over IPv6, using a range of addresses, assuming that the image hosting services in question only care about rate of requests from a single address.
EDIT: Also, for OP’s case, all he cares about is propagation of images hosted on other lemmy instances, not image hosting services. Presumably those instances don’t care about other instances serving their pictrs images. I wonder if it’d be possible to have an option to only proxy for pictrs-served images?
Rate limitors from ipv6 tend to take into account the whole subnet which is assigned to your account, so that’s not a way to avoid them
If i remember correctly after the downfall of reddit and the mass migration to Lemmy happened, A big issue was CSAM spreading across the Lemmy servers. Wouldn’t surprise me that that is the cause that images are no longer stored across servers.
That’s good to know, thank you. Unfortunately alot of the communities i spend time in have a lot of blahaj users, so i don’t have context of the post sometimes. Better than nothing, though.