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?
Since you’re the only one, you might consider setting an expiration on the media so your local storage serves as more of a cache. Like, I’m sure you’re far more likely to revisit a recent thread than a super old one, and as long as the original instance is still around you could redownload the media. This might require software patches though idk