If you’ve noticed a large number of bulk post removals performed by me in the modlog recently and are wondering if I’ve gone full authoritarian: no, I haven’t gone mad with power. Those were posts that were already removed by other community mods or posts that were self-deleted by their creators. Some were legitimate spam or otherwise violated server rules, but the bulk of them were just cleanup.

“If they’re already removed/self-deleted, why remove them again?”, you might ask.

Well, Lemmy treats Pictrs (the media subsystem, basically) like a black hole - images go in but it never removes them. When posts are modded or self-deleted, any media attached to them lives forever in pictrs with no clean way to remove them later*. That wastes a huge amount of disk space on my hosting stack for media that will never see the light of day again.

I’m not okay with that for so many reasons. Yeah, object storage is cheap, but why be wasteful?

The Lemmy + Pictrs integration…well, let’s just say it leaves much to be desired. “Suggest a feature enhancement” or “ping the Lemmy devs about it” you may be thinking. Haha, right.

I’m building a new API to interact with Lemmy, and the admin/mod components were the first parts that I developed. I’ve deployed parts of the prototype API to periodically clean up removed/deleted posts along with the media that was attached to them. I could do this silently on the backend and you’d never know, but in the interest of transparency (and also testing that the API works as expected), I’ve let it log its activities in the modlog as it would when it moves to production.

So, in closing, no, I have not gone mad with power. I’m just trying to keep my disk usage sane and not clutter up storage with abandoned media.

*They can be removed later, but it’s a clunky external process that doesn’t offer any guarantees.