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.
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
I don’t think it’s a good reason to block the birdsitelive.
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?
That’s what I said. But that still doesn’t mean every toot ever is stored, just those that are from users that are being followed. Still not a good reason. Do they want you to use their server or not??
