The Fediverse - especially the microblogging side of it - has deep issues when it comes to environmental sustainability.
And the high resource requirements, which result from an incredible level of redundancy, aren’t just bad environmentally: they make running a server more costly, and increase our reliance on Big Tech’s infrastructure.
I wrote about all this, along with some suggestions for how we can improve things somewhat.
What I feel is missing from the practical suggestions section: why cache images at all? They should be stored on the server they were uploaded to, and nowhere else. The image URL would be attached to the post, and could then be used by clients to fetch the image from the original server.
I thought lemmy did this, but it seems not (any more?).
I hear you on this - Akkoma does this by default, but the issue there is, let’s say someone on a tiny server posts an image, even a relatively small one - if it gets boosted by an account with 10k followers, that small server will effectively get DDOSed, assuming enough of those clients are online.