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.
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??