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.
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.