I set up a personal instance using https://masto.host. It’s a small operation that I believe is run by one person. Hugo has been great about responding to my questions.
My instance has only been up for about 3 days and I’ve exceeded my Media Storage limit twice. The first time, I upgraded to the “Planet” plan which has the added bonus of being more responsive.
This time, I’ve tried setting my Media Retention Period to 3 days and am hoping that’s sufficient.
Do you have any other optimization tips to share? Unfortunately (but also, fortunately), it’s a managed service, so I’m limited to only what is available in the Mastodon web interface.
I deactivated all relays and my media storage is settling into the 50GB range of my masto.host plan. It doesn’t seem to affect the posts of the people I follow.