I always get the “file size too large” or whatever the error is when trying to post images as comments. I’ve asked and was told that it’s lemm.ee’s limitation on posts/comments.
The maximum file size limit for images hosted directly on lemm.ee servers is always visible in the sidebar of our front page. The limit stands at 500kb per image currently.
Additionally, It’s also possible to post images larger than 500kb, they just have to be hosted externally. The markdown for this is
I run the same 500kb limit on my instance. It was becoming restrictive, so I added a feature to Tesseract that optionally preprocesses uploads to webp, client side, before uploading (with a user configurable quality level) which has worked well. Might be something to consider or perhaps can patch a similar preprocess step into your default UI.
Lemme is not a file (image) storage engine. What makes it so lightweight and fast on smaller hardware is its generally only dealing with text. Introducing large file support will just add bloat to the service with having to store the images. Not to mention this increases things like bandwidth billing from everyone viewing the image. That’s why you should use external image hosting services that are designed to do that.
If we want lemmy more mainstream then the interface needs to handle this itself we can’t expect normies to go do this themselves.
You can use postimg or imgur to host images. Don’t depend on the small instance servers
Imgur is more enshittified than reddit by now
