Data saving mode

[sombresu]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
Limited data plan on a third world country. Also as soon as the app is opened, It uses so much data.

Describe the solution you'd like
Reduce image preview
Not auto buffering videos an gifs
Reduce video resolution

[CTalvio]

This will be difficult. Lemmy does not currently provide lower quality versions of media for a lot of stuff, as it is often not even hosted on the instance. As such, its not possible to just "reduce resolution" of content to save data use.

[hjiangsu]

Yeah, as @CTalvio mentioned, it would be a bit difficult to reduce data usage down at this point in time because there's no option to change the quality of the images/media that is retrieved from lemmy.

One way to reduce data consumption is to reduce the amount of posts that get loaded in, or to do some further optimizations on our caching and network calls. However, this will take some time to do and this will only continue to get better over time as we continue working on Thunder! Reducing the amount of posts that get loaded in is also fairly minimal in terms of data usage so it would not improve data consumption much.

An extreme alternative would be to host our own servers which downscale the images and act as a proxy between the app and the lemmy instance. However, this brings in a whole new level of complexity and issues which would be best to avoid at this point in time.

[CTalvio]

It might be worth adding a setting to not load images for use in thumbnails at all.

[hjiangsu]

That's a good idea, that would definitely help alleviate data usage. Maybe this can be grouped as a setting for "Data Saving Mode" along with any other tweaks such as loading less posts/comments/etc.

@micahmo @ajsosa thoughts on other suggestions for lowering data usage?

[CTalvio]

I have discovered, that at least with images hosted on a lemmy instance, we in fact can request lower resolution images.

This image hosted on sopuli.xyz, can be requested in a variety of resolutions by using ?thumbnail=512&format=webp as a query string.

For example: https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/cd319103-2136-48d5-a326-fb0afed527b0.png?thumbnail=512&format=webp for 512p height image.

64p

128p

256p

512p

1024p

[CTalvio]

Further discovery. I have investigated this more, and it works even with images hosted outside a lemmy instance. The instance does in fact cache thumbnails even for externally hosted media, though not for all file types.

Still, this will allow for a significant reduction in data use!

[hjiangsu]

Oh wow, I didn't know that was possible either - do you know if the parameter is for width or height? It seems like its width, but thats just an assumption!

[CTalvio]

Oh wow, I didn't know that was possible either - do you know if the parameter is for width or height? It seems like its width, but thats just an assumption!

It is for height. I discovered this because I went investigating why posts sometimes had low resolution on my Photon instance. The taller images get much less resolution for their width with the same 512p height regardless of aspect ratio.

[Blisterexe]

not to necropost, but id love the option to not load images at all when on data, because i have 500mb of data, and images eat that very fast

[hjiangsu]

@Blisterexe

I believe that is an existing issue here: #352. I'll see if I have the time to get to it!