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.
I once made a tool that indexes every image posted on the fediverse. It ran from Jan 2019 to about August 2019. I don’t remember the exact numbers but including the original full size, the thumbnail, the meta data including the author idkey, profile, and avatar, was sum total under a few gigs. It was indexing something like 2-8 images a second (it was highly variable).
Of course, the fediverse is bigger now. I wonder what it would be.