People tend to forget that all those memes and videos need space and those media files are replicated throughout the network and depending on the media caching policies on federated instances, this takes as much space as on a local storage.
and to add something here. I think that the resources compute/memory/storage/hardware needed per user on the fediverse are much higher than on a centralized platform like twitter.
@ybaumy There really is no societal need for social media platforms like facebook, twitter and the fediverse. Humanitiy has worked fine before those innovations and they have not been needed to solve a problem other than maybe boredom yet. I think that those circumcstances offer an opportunity to create a societal problem though that could itself be a solution to a problem that we currently are not even aware of in an explicit form. Implicitly ecological, economical crisis, communication crisis.
autodidact opinion
Social Media is a short-route, un-gate-keeped form of mass media.
Its function is to circumvent traditional mass media (journalism is making public, fotos and videos come right from the event without relevance criteria, etc.)
It also functions as an observer/controller of mass media itself (re-entry).
Its necessity results from the incompleteness of traditional media which relied on the economy and political systems, a circumstance holding mass media in an incomplete differentiation. Mass media's limited structures also limited their observer and explainer capacities.
