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.
No you are not right. It’s not a problem. Pleroma doesn’t even download the media, Mastodon does but it’s not that much. Each person follows just a few hundred accounts, they don’t produce too much content. The fedivers is pretty large already and it hasn’t become a problem.
deleted by creator
The biggest servers actually have an advantage, because the overlap of followed posts between users would be huge. But yeah having lots of images and short videos does result in big amounts of data.