How will we deal with all the broken images?

Not a solution, but this is a great reminder to add descriptions/alt text to your images.

I agree, they really help.

I'm gonna run some scripts on my instance's database to look for posts that have lemm.ee pict-rs URLs and local thumbnails. Then update the url value to that of the local thumbnail_url. That'll at least fix them on my instance where I have a copy.

I won't be doing that until after lemm.ee shuts down, otherwise the original values will federate back in if there's any activity on the posts.

For comment images or ones where my instance didn't create a thumbnail, they'll just have to be broken I guess - same goes for the community icons, though I suppose I could go ahead and get local versions of those and update the communities afterward. Prob also set those to "Mods only" in the database to keep local users from trying to post there.

For user avatars, I'll probably just clear those in the database so when looking back at old content from .ee, it won't try to fetch them and timeout/404.

There were less posts to worry about then, but for community icons and user avatars, that's the same thing I did when kbin shut down.

Mind empowering my laziness and sharing that query?

I was also planning on bulk locking all their communities, to avoid any isolated islands of people that don't realize the community is gone.
- I'm still putting that together, but it's basically something like:
  
  UPDATE post set url = thumbnail_url where thumbnail_url like 'https://dubvee.org/pictrs/image/%' and url like 'https://lemm.ee/pictrs/image/%'
  
  For the Kbin users to clear out their avatar/banners, I just did:
  
  UPDATE person set avatar=NULL, banner=NULL where instance_id=(select id from instance where domain='kbin.run')
  
  UPDATE community set icon=NULL, banner=NULL where instance_id=(select id from instance where domain='kbin.run')
  
  ...and will update that for lemm.ee
  
  I'm working on a Bun/NodeJS script to download the avatars, icons, and banners for all the lemm.ee users/communities, upload them to my pictrs, and then update the DB with the new values referencing the local images.
  
  Prob gonna have to break that up into two steps so I can download and file the images before lemm.ee goes down and upload/assign them after (so they're not overwritten by federation).
  
  Not sure if I'm gonna do that for comment / post body images. Basically, I just want the archived communities to look nice.

Real answer: We probably won't, just like every other website.

Some of the big places might have their own copies saved but most instances can't afford to operate like that.

I used https://postimages.org/ for all the pictures I posted, so should be fine at least for those

I'm editing some of my posts to use those.
Testing testing...

It works when I use the direct link (https://postimg.cc/RN0r6qp8).

When I use the regular link (https://i.postimg.cc/15GydqG9/Image-20250602-145924.jpg), it says failed to load in Voyager.
- I usually go direct link indeed

Lemm.ee had and still has strict limitations to image uploads, forcing its users to use external image providers like catbox.moe or postimages. So these images should all still be there.

Granted, I'm not sure how the thumbnails for these externally hosted images work and if they're exclusively stored on lemm.ee

Catbox, notably, is also on the verge of shutting down.
- Patreon dropped them.
  
  Also, not necessarily on the verge anymore.
The thumbnails are generated indivdually by each instance.

I just compressed all my images, thinking lemm.ee would outlive all the image hosts.

Images dont get saved locally on other instances if they host the content? Well that seems like a big flaw in "federation"..

I assume it's an intentional trade-off by the devs to reduce the storage burden. If each instance is a complete mirror of all federated instances then hosting becomes that much more expensive.
- It's also an avenue for attacks.
Instances have 3 options. Save it locally, proxy it, or do nothing. Saving every federated image is not feasible for small instances. It's not a fault of the protocol that instance operators don't want to pay a thousand dollars a month for storage. Matrix has this problem, and look what happened to them: tiny instances are expensive to run, so don't flourish.
Not really, it means I can't send every lemmy instance csam.
Depending on how the admin has pict-rs (the "subsystem" it uses for media) configured, post images can create local copies /thumbnails for image posts. Some instances opt to do that, some don't.

Other images like ones posted a comments, user/community avatars/banners aren't stored anywhere except their home instance.

But yeah, even the limited caching has proven problematic if questionable/illegal content gets posted.

I don't really care about images on here all that much ... I don't mind them being lost if I lose my instance.

Most of the images that are shared are basically 'one off' images for a quick gag or as part of a conversation specific to that moment. And often that conversation or interact is a 'one off' event as well. Which means it was all meaningful when it happened and when it was read the few times it was noticed over two or three years but then it is forgotten.

If there is anything meaningful I come across that I think is important to me or something I want to keep a reference of or keep ... I'll save it or screenshot it and put it away in my own storage or data.

Otherwise, I really don't mind losing all those other images I had created over the years ... they already did their work when people saw them at that moment.

The only reason anyone would want to keep all that data is to archive it for historical reasons .... or to monetize it by collecting a bunch of unique data, images connected to real people.

It looks like archive.org is capturing some of lemm.ee. So, it's possible that most of the images are there and could be referenced.