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Howdy friend!
Not an expert but I received that error yesterday. My instance was having some issues with a flag set that limited the amount of request that could be handled. The hoster or my instance had to change that flag number. Maybe you're experiencing a similar issue? Lemmy has grown a lot in the last week so those kinds of issues will very likely reoccurre as the community continues to grow
Heya! Yep, that's probably the case. I'm curious if that can be adjusted on lemmy.ca, assuming the server is capable of that
I'm no expert, but API's usual put a limit on how many requests per minute can be made.
That's what I'm suspecting, but I thought I'd check with an admin. Definitely makes sense if that's the case.
A "Rate limit" is a server-side thing to prevent abuse or accidental overwork of the server. It's a limit imposed by the server at how often you can do something, the something might be commenting, upvoting, uploading an image, etc. and the limits might be layered in that you might be able to only post once every 2 minutes no matter what, but you also might not be able to make more than 100 API requests over a period of 60s regardless of what those requests are.
The limits can be hard limits, as in you hit the limit and you have to wait for 2mins before trying again, or it might be more like a sliding scale where it's "no more than x over a given 5min period" in which case mashing the button will lock you out for 5mins but hitting it every minute or so won't incur a limit.
they're currently just at the defaults, which is 6 images/hour, which seems pretty low. at the same time i don't want to overwhelm the server (it's already having some hiccups here and there, and i've read that image processing on lemmy is cpu-intensive), so i'll just leave it as is for now, and revisit it later.
as an alternative, you could always put the images on third party image hosts, and link to them (although i know that's not ideal).
Thanks for the great response! I've been hosting gifs on pixelfed.social anyway, so I might just try hosting everything on there if it's an easier server load. That is, unless you know of a more local pixelfed instance I can use.