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?
It was my understanding that images stayed on the source server and only thumbnails were “federated”.
I was partially wrong about what is cached and updated my comment.
Thanks for the update. I was concerned. Tho I still need to figure out how to manage that storage.