Everyone fully missing the point here. This is the banner image for !linux@programming.dev (that's not where we are right now for the record), and it has a normal JPEG size of 7.7MB. When it's served as WebP it's 3.8MB. OP is correct that this is very stupid and wasteful for a web content image. It's a triple-monitor 1440p wallpaper that's used verbatim, and it should instead be compressed down to be bandwidth-friendly. I was able to get it to 1.4MB at JPEG quality 80, and when swapping it out in dev tools and performing A/B testing I can't tell the difference. This should be brought to the attention of a mod on that community so it can stop sucking people's data for no reason.
It could be resized too. 5120x1440 is way too big for a website banner. There's no reason to go more than double the size it will actually be displayed at. That would bring it down to a couple hundred KB.
it's not. the lemmy-ui max width for the poster element is far smaller than that (1104x960). in fact, the poster element is set to be a near-square (displays as rectangular in web and mobile web on the page header), as it also displays in the sidebar and in mobile apps as a square if the image is. most mods simply assume it's a rectangle and upload a rectangular image.
this image is made to be the largest usable resolution lemmy can display as a community poster and optimized to be very small in file size. see on https://lemm.ee/c/plex
That's a question for a web developer, which I am not. I would expect it to be the max common resolution width. A quick Google shows that modern ultrawides are 5120x1440. So that's probably why.
Sorry for being a bit of a dick, I think you mean that the file "is 3.8MB".
"mb" would mean millibit, 3.8millibit is an impossibly small file size, and would never exist practically (though I an sure that with some clever maths a zip bomb could be designed so that one bit of data could be compressed into 3.8millibits)
MB is the proper shorthand for MegaByte, a decent file size for a high quallity pucture, depending on the format and compression.
Unless we analyze the image, and determine the image format and compression settings we have no idea of if 3.8MB is a resonable size of the file or not, and the mods have hidden a rar file in the picture file, it is highly improbable that would be the case however.
The issue is not that the large image was uploaded. The server should always store the highest quality available, and serve whatever resolution is requested by the client.
I usually use Lemmy at my smartphone with 4G that was released 3 years ago, I'm happy with it, and I don't need other one more new and expensive.
The area of 4G is very congested, then the connection is slower in peak hours.
Only rich people has last medium and high end smartphone with 5G, and live in area with that coverage.
I live now in downtown, and just got slow fiber connection 3 months ago, there are a lot buildings with only ADSL in this area, and it's the capital.
Maybe you are lucky, with good connection.
Is not so hard to optimize the image for everyone in the world, and maybe put a link to original big image of you want.
There's a lot of ways to optimize, like changing resolution, reduce colors, clean image. And compression, using webp lossy 95% you got a very small file that looks very close to the original, usually got less than 1MB.
Today's web is very bloated for no reason, and very slow in old computers. Browsers are the main RAM eaters.