I ask generally out of curiosity. I was just thinking that as big social media fractures, old school isolated forums might become “cool again”, and that one of the achievements of lemmy might be as a nice platform for simply running a forum for whatever community you want all without needing to worry about federation.
If it turns out that work of federating data is a substantial part of the resource overhead, and that an isolated server would actually be quite efficient, that’d be quite a nice feather in the lemmy cap I’d say. Hexbear seems to have been using lemmy this way for a while and it seems to have been successful too.
On my instance, the owner said that just the cached text content is something like 25GB.
So it’s very storage intensive as it seems Lemmy doesn’t delete the cached content.
Some storage optimisation came in the latest version … it may have been to do with what you describe.
Indeed, especially looking at the other coment with 2.8 GB
The main table that all the growth was in is now split and the cached federated content can be dropped with out much work, and there was talk of tuning it to expire at 3 months.
The content on no.lastname.nz (very small instance) is only about 10-15GB including cached images