Something that feels off to me about Mastodon is content preservation — whenever I try looking at an image post more than a couple of months old, images don't load or they're broken links. The text is always fine and image preview sometimes work too, just the full thing once you click on it is busted. Is media just more ephemeral in general over here?
@kilmo yah its been a major turnoff to me. Many days i check my feed and half the images don’t load at all (full nor preview). And there are i assume mostly new images.

@Straander so apparently this is a combination of Mastodon UI and server optimization issues. The first time anyone on your instance access an image your server caches it for X number of days, and broken images usually indicate it’s been ditched from the cache. your admin can tweak the cache length if you see it a lot.

but also, the fact that Mastodon isn’t clearly communicating that a broken image is typically also being refreshed now that someone requested it again is itself a UI issue.

@Straander I think. At least that’s what’s happening with me looking at older posts. So it happening with you with mostly new images is probably something your admin might be able to fix cuz it could be a similar or related issue.
@Straander oh! If it’s happening with new images, maybe you’re the first person to see it on your instance and it hasn’t loaded yet. Then it’s a Mastodon UI issue where it hasn’t communicated that it’s simply just loading
@kilmo @Straander it weirdly just says "not available" instead of "not ready" or such. It's kinda derp. I keep wondering on blimps if I have something configured wrong cause I'd expect the media proxy to fetch it but it seems to never work
@kilmo many times i click on the image to fullscreen it which i assume prompts the server to load it. But it usually won’t load after a ten second wait
@Straander yeah, I see that and have no idea what’s going on there. I’m assuming it’s just really bad at communicating it’s loading cuz if I go back to the post later it’s there
@kilmo @Straander It does appear the next release (4.2.0) will have some of that in there, but no idea yet on the extent of it. Will be very nice to see it handle remote media re-fetch more smoothly than it currently does (when it does)