My advice if you're trying to start your own #mastodon isntance: USE CLOUD STORAGE! I'm specifically using #s3, but there are other options. If you end up federated with a lot of other servers you're going to be downloading a lot of media, and that will fill up your local storage quickly. S3 is pretty cheap, and a better form of #contentdelivery anyway. #advice #gettingstarted #twittermigration #selfhosted
@watzon Yeesh! Ok, thanks. That's pretty painful. Is there a resource that describes where this data comes from / how it builds up in more detail?
@quasifrodo not in detail, at least not as far as I've seen. It basically boils down to a media cache though. Every media containing post, avatar, header, and emoji are all cached so that they can be fetched more quickly the next time. All of that caching adds up.
@watzon Got it, thank you! One last question -- did it keep growing, or top out at around that 160?
This might be a fairly major wrinkle in my plans to self-host my own instance, but better to find out ahead of time
@quasifrodo oh it's definitely still growing, especially with the number of people fleeing #twitter lately. The good thing is, you can choose how long media items are cached for
@quasifrodo I managed to fill a 160GB drive in a couple days. Made it so I couldn't really do anything on the VPS that's running my instance.