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.
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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.
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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.
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It’s mastodon.uno, at now 21300 users
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This is the answer I got from my admin: «toots are stored locally for a simple reason: let’s say a toot goes viral, then hundreds of instances would have to upload the message with photos or video from the unfortunate person’s server, which could collapse. Uploading a copy locally saves a lot of stress on the servers.» What do you think?
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