What does this mean for you?

Essentially, we have transitioned from using Cloudflare to Amazon CloudFront for content delivery. This should improve the initial loading speed when accessing your Flowinity files in the Gallery and Collections.

We have made this change in order to combat noticeable performance degradation after our recent switch to content buckets for storage. This allows us to store more content at a lower cost which can be replicated across the world for an improved user experience.

What is a bucket?

A bucket is essentially a remote storage location that holds your files, managed by a third party cloud provider. In Flowinity's instance, we use Wasabi Storage for storing your files. You can learn more about Wasabi here. It should be noted that Wasabi does not automatically scan or view your files for moderation purposes.

Removal of temporary URLs

When accessing a Flowinity file, there are basically two links involved, one is the "Flowinity link" and the other is the bucket link, which is the real file.
https://i.flowinity.com/i/d102284d9082.png (Flowinity Link)
https://ap-southeast-2.flowinity.com/4c059d.... (Bucket Link)
While the Flowinity link never expires, and it's designed to be shared, the bucket link does. If you shared the bucket link instead of the Flowinity link, it would stop working after 7 days. We found this was unnecessarily confusing and therefore we have removed temporary URLs.

Does this apply to older files?

While files created after the 28th of November 2024 will no longer have temporary URLs, older files will continue to have temporary URLs generated, however, they will still have the significant performance improvements.