Few days ago I discovered that any time you follow a fediverse account on a different instance than your one, the server you are on mirrors the original content of any toot/post, and I think this is a huge issue, because then every Fediverse server/instance could quickly get overloaded from contents from other servers! Am I right? I’ve always thought that toots/posts from other instances were just “empty shells” retrieving the content on demand.
No you are not right. It’s not a problem. Pleroma doesn’t even download the media, Mastodon does but it’s not that much. Each person follows just a few hundred accounts, they don’t produce too much content. The fedivers is pretty large already and it hasn’t become a problem.
The problem is quite similar to Matrix, which also mirrors all chats. Several large Matrix servers were shut down because ever growing databases reached hundreds of gigabytes and it became too expensive to operate.
I think the fediverse has the advantage that it does not depend on an over engineered distributed database like Matrix which makes it much harder to delete old stuff, but it does still limited the size and interconnectivity a ActivityPub server can grow to as well.
The biggest servers actually have an advantage, because the overlap of followed posts between users would be huge. But yeah having lots of images and short videos does result in big amounts of data.
I was following some Birdsitelive accounts, Admin of the Mastodon I’m on regularly block every Birdsitelive instances they see being used, they answered me the reason is the overload of content.
How many users does your instance have?
It’s mastodon.uno, at now 21300 users