

A vast majority of instance software will store all old remote non-media data (that could easily be re-fetched when needed) permanently, even if nobody has seen it in years.
Seriously, this is the most befuddling design decision. There’s no reason to cache that data more than like, maybe a week.
Maybe it’s because I’m a sysadmin background type and not a programmer, but the endless obsession that fedi-software has with caching everything at every stop along the route from the poster to the person reading the post is just the most weird thing to me.
If you’ve never seen it, https://github.com/PeerConnect/peer-connect is a clever solution to p2p CDN stuff.
It’s not Bittorrent for images, but it’s still a shockingly elegant thing.
It’s probably a dead project, but I ran across it and went ‘why is this not how everything works’.