[jherskovic]

Federated content is copied to every instance, so yes, follow a few people and you can see your instance's disk usage explode. I run an instance for some friends.

The usage can be contained with a few cron jobs to purge old cached content aggressively. Running

`tootctl statuses remove && tootctl media remove` once a week is enough to make it sane in my case.

[jherskovic]

To add to this, you can also set it up so entire federated servers are followed, and it may be that way by default. So follow ONE person on mastodon.social, and suddenly your toy instance is trying to copy a significant chunk of the Fediverse to its hard drive in real time.

[_cenw]

That's done via relay servers, you can't just firehose an entire server without its cooperation.

[jherskovic]

You're correct. I forgot about that. I did try relaying for a while, that's what made the usage REALLY explode.