I did not click yes but is this malware?
Answered: Thank you all so much!
Not an iPhone user, but it doesn’t seem like malware.
It looks like iOS is letting you know Lemmy is using a bunch of storage on your phone, and is asking if it can use more. It’s fine as long you’re not short on space.
Just download more storage
why didnt i think of that damn
Looks like you hit a size limit for Lemmy’s cache. When a website uses more storage than you’d expect from most websites, you can get prompted to allow websites to grow further.
Safari prompts you after a website uses 1GB of storage. You may see this notification on other web apps as well. You should be able to retract this permission and clear the storage if your phone runs out of storage.
I’m not sure how you’ve managed to get Lemmy to use so much storage, but I can see it happen after a few weeks of browsing.
Memes. Lots and lots of memes.
The notice itself isn’t malware, but I’m not sure on the cause. For some reason the Lemmy web client occasionally tries to cache a metric fuckton on iOS Safari (and probably elsewhere but it happens silently), which sounds like something for the devs to look into.
Generally, Lemmy’s 100x better in stability and speed than it was a couple months ago when a bunch of new people started working on it, but before then it was the side project of a handful of people and it showed. EG - The infamous, three-year-old Hexbear instance managed to have the entire picture side of it go down for a couple days because someone uploaded an absurdly large, extremely low quality photo of a North Korean soldier on it. So, there are probably still some issues like that kicking around.
There’s no reason to use anywhere near that much storage browsing Lemmy.
If they’ve somehow ended up caching a lot of videos and pictures, I could see it happening. I’d try clearing the cache, see what happens.
I doubt this permission prompt would include implicitly cached content (the browser would just clean up the oldest stuff). Unless the site is explicitly downloading and caching video I wouldn’t expect that to count.
Quite possible that there is some sort of storage leak in the frontend.
Thank you for reminding me to clear the 7GB cache Liftoff takes up.
Use an app - Memmy, Mlem, Voyager…too many choices to stick with the pretty weak web UI.
