I’ve noticed a lot of broken images around the place and can’t quite work out what’s happening. It doesn’t seem to be a caching issue, at least not on my end, as trying to visit the image URL directly returns a 404.

As noted in a post in the Melbourne daily thread a few weeks ago, there are also a lot of broken community icons about the place. And as I think was raised a while ago, thumbnails seem to be broken most of the time as well.

As an example, here’s what the trending communities tab looks like:

The communities page is a little better, but it’s about 50/50 as to whether the icon does or doesn’t load:

Here’s a list of my own posts with missing images I’ve noticed recently

That last image seems to be super broken at the time of writing. Instead of just returning a generic 404, it returns:
{"error":"unknown","message":"Request error: error sending request for url (http://pictrs:8080/image/original/b4df332b-82a9-4ec8-b115-ac1b1b1824b0.jpeg): connection error: Connection reset by peer (os error 104)"}

Additionally, this is how thumbnails on links have been previewing:

Right-clicking and opening in new tab, it seems to be pulling a random pixel from somewhere in the image and then enlarging it and proxying it (500% zoom):

Example URL

But then other URL thumbnails don’t work at all, for instance this post on trending:

Which links to Wikipedia, but fails for whatever reason, then tries to load an image called “broken-image-fallback.png”, and, ironically, can’t even load that (leads to a 404 page).

And some thumbnails on working images don’t work, for example this post in c/GardeningAustralia doesn’t load - even if I click on the thumbnail (which should normally load the full size/original image), but does work if I click the image URL itself.

One more thing: this new image proxy thing is getting super annoying. I realise it’s a Lemmy-side implementation issue, but a couple of sites (Imgur, for example), don’t like all the image requests from a single server/IP and end up rate limiting us. This effectively means that Imgur is unusable and no images load.

I actually thought there might have been another mass image purge like last years’ incident which required the purging of 48 hours of images, but there hasn’t been any announcements about it, and the other broken images dotted around the joint makes me think Pictrs is on its deathbed.

Any ideas what’s going on?

Sidenote: image uploads whether in posts or as embedded images within posts/comments seem to fail about half the time for me on both mobile and desktop. I thought this was an issue with Boost again, but it’s happening to me on PC as well. On mobile, it usually either returns no error at all, or a 500. On PC, no UI errors are displayed, it just doesn’t embed the image, but network tools tell me that something somewhere is returning a 500, likely the image uploader thingy.