As I was browsing lemmy and the fediverse at large, this question kept popping into my head.
Since multimedia files have a much bigger footprint than raw text, it made me feel worried since as time goes, massive resources will be needed to keep up with the big data coming in.
I do wonder if the instances have taken the route of the cloud and just decided to put all of it in something like AWS S3? Or maybe they use self hosted storage with something like minio for object storage?
This actually brings up another question for me! Say your account is on an instance that doesn’t allow something, like nudity. If you subscribe to a community on another instance that DOES allow it, you’re saying that everything you see there does end up (redundantly) hosted by your home instance. Has the Lemmy moderation/admin community in general decided on whether or not that’s breaking the home instance’s rules?
Right now you can only disable caching of nsfw content by disabling NSFW for the instance, but of course this has nothing to do with “soft” rules that are only written out in text.
Imo the best solution would be to allow admins to have more granular control over caching, e.g. disabling caching for specific instances / communities or whitelisting. And we need an option to disable caching altogether.