Ok, I see in diaspora.yml the configuration for an external image host but haven’t found much on how to actually set that up and use it. Is Amazon S3 the recommended host for that? What other options are there?
There is no recommended asset host. Settings for S3 are listed explicitly in the diaspora.yml file partly because it is a major asset host likely to be chosen by a fair few podmins who want external asset hosting, and has specific variables that need to be set to enable it. Also I think it’s a hang-over from the original version of diaspora set up by the founders, who themselves chose to use S3 for assets on their pod, which was the test environment for the first iterations of the software. Certainly default settings within the S3 section such as ‘us-east-1’ applied to them. And there was no particular need to remove it.
A lot of people who use diaspora are very conscious about privacy and are not happy about a company such as Amazon having access to any of their data, so a pod using S3 does act as a blocker to some potential user of that pod. But I don’t imagine this will be an issue for people who have been happy for all their personal data to be hosted by Google!
Personally I think that S3 should be removed from the diaspora.yml file so that d* doesn’t appear to be endorsing or promoting use of that service. At the very least, I think it should be made a sub-section of the asset-hosting section, rather than being a separate top-level section within it.
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Yeah, I was wondering about S3 just because of the privacy issues. I’m new to this so not even sure what other images hosting options there are. I just know that I found out people REALLY like their images and it sucks up disk space fast!
Yeah, I would +1 @goob on this, if you can avoid amazon that’s better.
About images and disk space, there is room from improvement in the diaspora* side imo as we scale each uploaded images to a lot of different sizes which are probably not all needed anymore (internet connection improved since 2010 
). That’s not solving your problem right now though 
How big the disk space is an issue for you? Usually the hardware bottleneck is the amount of RAM.
It’s not bad right now but it will be at some point. We’ve added 8GB of images since Sunday and the max disk size on my server is 500GB. Right now RAM isn’t an issue either though I’ve had to upgrade the server twice since Sunday. I never expected to get this much traffic when Google announced they were closing G+! 
There’s a PR for making it so that you can use S3-compliant stores on other systems. I was thinking of picking that up and trying out something like that on DigitalOcean infrastructure. I haven’t done any serious pod-hosting. If a hoster isn’t a coder I wouldn’t mind helping to revive that change, or replicate it, if someone who does hosting on DO or another S3-compliant system wouldn’t mind helping with testing it.
Hi, I’ve personally done that with my mastodon instance, where I picked an S3 compatible hosting company (that is not amazon) that is in the same country as my pod, in this case Switzerland. It works well.
I think many options missing from diaspora could be simply ported from Mastodon if at all possible, there are a lot of similarities on media hosting, moderation etc… I’m no developper but I think it should be easier to just port a feature that’s already been done, rather than to create one from scratch.
Any thought on that ?