Since the CSAM attacks, I have disabled pictrs on my instance until I can turn off caching images from other instances. However, I haven't been keeping up on pictrs development. I know there were talks about making this feature, but I am unable to find any information about pictrs and the state of development.
Is pictrs open source? If yes, does anyone have a link to the source? If no, is there anywhere I can find information about the state of development of the project? The only thing I can find is its docker hub page here, which has a completely blank description.
I actually contributed to this repo! But I was still too spooked to use pictrs, even with this. Also, I'm no lawyer, but I think using that repo might be illegal in my country. I'm not 100% sure, but I saw some people saying that in my country I have an obligation to report CSAM images to the government, and deleting them could get me charged with obstructing justice or destroying evidence.
Though it looks like pictrs now has an option to set the amount of time pictrs holds on to proxied images. I think if I just add the option "PICTRS__MEDIA__RETENTION__PROXY=0m" to the pictrs container in my docker-compose.yml file, it shouldn't hold on to the images from other instances?
I was looking for similar information myself, but from what I could gather pictrs v0.5 added media retention settings which allows pictrs to drop the original files locally when it wasn't accessed for some time, also applies to the generates thumbnails (variants).
I couldn't find a way to force pictrs to basically not store the remote images at all, only variants (thumbnails).
And afaik, lemmy would also have to change the way it works with remote images (and interacts with pictrs) - as for example to not download/upload anything until the post is actually viewed.