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.
