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.

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[–] glowing_hans@sopuli.xyz 0 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.

text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.

Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.