[jazzyjackson]

> I have 55k tweets, that would be a nightmare to host locally)

theyre tweets, how much could they cost? @ 280 bytes each, that's like 15MB. double it for cryptographic signatures and reply-to metadata. is that really too much to ask for the capacity to transfer to another host at anytime?

(also, leaving aside the fact that 55k tweets puts you in the 0.1% of most prodigious users)

[bombcar]

I have every post made on BlueSky up to a certain point last weekend and it's only 3 GB.

I have every email I've ever received or sent (and not deleted) and it's only 4GB.

Should something require I download all that every time I login? No. But having a local copy is amazing, and a truly federated system should have and even be able to depend on those.

The Mastodon Server Covenant is a joke; the only enforcement is to remove the server from the list of signup servers; which if it just fell over dead because the admin died/doesn't care/got arrested/got a job will not matter.

[godzillabrennus]

How have you pared down your email to just 4GB?

[bombcar]

Not sure, I guess I don't send or receive many attachments and delete marketing/spam.

My work email is 10gb.

[zimpenfish]

As of my last Twitter export, I had 54425 tweets and the tweet data comes to 110M. But there's also 2G of media files that goes with it.

[jonathankoren]

So… not only fits on ever popular cloud storage providers free tier, but also your phone.

Seriously. This is setting off all sorts of red flags. I’m old enough not to trust non w3c standards.

[laserbeam]

How did we get to 55k tweets being a nightmare for any social media platform?

A quick search got me to twitter stats from 2013 when people were posting 200 billion tweets per year. Thats 5-6 orders of magnitude more. You don't get a 10000x improvement just by federating and hosting multiple nodes.

[tsimionescu]

The discussion here was about archiving each user's tweets on their own client device - this is where the 55k was brought up as a problem. I still think it's a low number, even if it includes plenty of images.

[remram]

With a decent amount of images and videos this can easily be 100+GB. Even if it's a fraction of that, not something I want to sync down to my device.

[chrismorgan]

> double it for cryptographic signatures and reply-to metadata

Ah, email, where a message of 114 characters with no formatting ends up over 9KB due to authentication and signatures, spam analysis stuff, delivery path information and other metadata. Sigh. Although I doubt this will end up as large as email, the lesson is that metadata can end up surprisingly large.

In this instance, I think 1–2KB is probably more realistic than the half kilobyte of “double it”.

[MattRix]

There’s also all the media to go along with them.

[nr2x]

Pretty sure a nontrivial percentage of peoples smartphones have that many thumbnails for the photo gallery app alone.

Anybody who has had a smartphone for a decade likely has at minimum 10k photos in their cloud locker with local thumbnail.

[acjohnson55]

Ok, so add some more megabytes to that. Most people don't have that much microblogging data.

[Wowfunhappy]

I actually think photos could potentially add up to quite a lot!

[acjohnson55]

Sure, they could. Most people don't post tons of hi res photos. But I'm sure there are ways you could optimize to not have all the content on local device, if it's such a big deal. But this is a really strange point to me to be hung up on.

[MattRix]

I think you’d be surprised at the number of photos posted, but also many people post tons of gifs (especially reaction gifs) which are fairly large.