There is a selection for automatic updates under Settings > Software Update, but I swear it does nothing on my distro.

This appears to be a known bug.

Y’all don’t update your services?

It would put the more popular instances under enormous stress, if they had to serve every single subscriber from any other instance.

From what I understand, media (images, videos, etc.) is not cached. Does that not mean that, in the worst case where every post contained an image, the instance would be serving every subscriber, anyways?

I don’t really understand this reasoning. Some server would still need to receive those requests at some point. Would it not be better if those requests were distributed, rather than pounded onto one server? If you have a server caching all the content for its users, then all of its users are sending all of those requests for content to that one single server. If users fetched content from their source servers, then the load would be distributed. The only real difference that I can think of is that the speed of post retreival. Even then, though, that could be flawed, as perhaps the source server is faster than one’s host server.

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I’m not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user’s posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?

it is storage that requires more attention

Please correct me if I am wrong, but this feels like a flaw with how Lemmy (perhaps other fediverse apps as well, I’m not sure) is designed. Why do I need to store all posts made to a community that one of the users on my instance subscribes to? Would it not be better to simply store my user’s posts, and comments, and the posts made to any communities hosted on my instance? Why do I need to store information from other instances, and users?

you could use a lower quality stream (…) for motion detection, then use that to trigger recording on a higher quality stream.

Brilliant idea! Thank you for the suggestion!

If doing CPU-based motion analysis

Whyd do you specifically mention CPU-based motion analysis? Does this idea not work with the Google Coral TPU, for example?

That’s quite a few cameras. I would do an audit on how many you will actually need first, because you will likely find you could get by with 5-10.

That’s a fair point. I haven’t actually methodically gone through to see exactly how many I would need just yet. The numbers that I chose were somewhat just ballpark off the top of my head.

You will also want some form of reliable storage for your clips

I am planning to give the camera server dedicated storage for the data. If I’m really feeling like splurging on it, I may look into getting WD Purple drives, or the like.

as well as the ability to back up those clips/shots to the cloud somewhere.

I’m not sure that I would need this very much. I’m mostly interested in a sort of ephemeral surveilance system; I only really need to store, at most, a few days, and then rewrite over it all.

I’m personally running 4 cameras (3x1080 @ 15fps, 1x4k @ 25fps) through my ~7 year old Synology DS418play NAS

Would you say that 15FPS is a good framerate for surveilance? Or could one get away with even less to lessen the resource requirements?

whereas I can tweak stuff on Surveillance Station quite easily.

What tweaking do you generally need to do for the camera server?

The space requirements get super intense with many cameras like that unless you compress the video.

I think Frigate uses h264 if I remember correctly. Also I’m not planning on storing and archiving the recorded data. I most likely would only save a day or a couple days. You do raise a good point about vacations, though - I should probably have enough storage for possible vacations.

Also if the cameras don’t encode then the data flow would congest your network something fierce.

The newtork that the camera feeds would be flowing through would essentially be isolated from the rest of the network. I intend to hook the cameras up to a dedicated network switch, which would then be connected to the camera server.

The biggest issue as I see it with so many cameras would be how to find interesting stuff in all that data.

What’s nitce about Frigate, is that it uses OpenCV, and TensorFlow to analyze the video streams for moving objects.

More Information can be found on Frigate’s website.

Thank you for the explanation!

Unfortunately, it seems, if I understand understand correcly, that this is not sustainable in the long term for small instances/servers. If Lemmy continues to grow in popularity, then the influx of content will continue to increase, thereby pushing small servers out of participation due to lack of resources. The data storage requirements, I fear, will become a very limiting issue.

I feel that if servers only tracked what their users directly participated in (i.e. only save comments, and posts directly made by the user), this issue would not be as problematic.

For example, I would like to host my own instance with only my account on it. I was initially hoping that my data storage requirements would only be directly proportional to how much I, as a user, use Lemmy; the server would only need to store my personally created data, and nothing else. Unfortunately, however, it appears that I would also have to have enough resources to sustain everyone elses posts which is a far steeper requirement.

When your instance needs to fetch from another instance it will

Meaning it will only fetch what is being actively looked at?

Only communities that your users subscribe to will be updated by their “origin” instances.

So when an external community is subscribed to from an account located on your located instance, from the point of subscribing forward, your local instance will begin downloading every single post that will ever be made to that subscribed communty, regardless of who posted it?

Or better yet, do you only store what the users on that instance do (i.e. their posts, and posts to the communities hosted on that instance)?

This does happen, but it also stores what your users do on remote instances as well as “copies” of what they interact with. Images (currently the only media hosted by lemmy servers) are linked to thier “origin” as well. So you are storing text of posts and comments.

This is the main point of confusion to me. From my current understanding, it feels as if it contradicts what you had previously said:

Only communities that your users subscribe to will be updated by their “origin” instances.

If it’s already pulling in all posts and comments on that community, what use is specifically storing anything that the users do on that community? Would it not be already stored?