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1. Embed this notice
   Paul (pwaring@social.xk7.net)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 21:58:51 JST Paul

   • Masto.host

   @mastohost Thanks. Problem at the moment is that I'm only following ~400 people and already I'm at 85% before the 7 day purge kicks in. Is there any way for me to see what's using all the space? Also if I follow a user who boosts lots, but I hide their boosts, do those still get stored on my instance?

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 21:57:36 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Masto.host
     • Paul

     @pwaring @mastohost AIUI yes. The problem is entirely large media posts and it should be entirely fixable by purging more aggressively or not even preemptively fetching to begin with.

     But this requires some modifications to Mastodon I think and I'm not clear on whether mastohost gives you the capability to do that (ntm mastohost is targeted at folks who don't want to or know how to do that).

     It also seems like fixing the problem is financially de-incentivized if users are having to pay for more storage to work around the problem, unless they're selling the storage at-cost.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 22:43:52 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Masto.host
     • Paul

     @mastohost @pwaring Ok, that's good news. Is there a way to avoid precaching of media entirely? (Not fetch until first access by a local user)

   • Embed this notice
     Masto.host (mastohost@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 22:43:53 JST Masto.host

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Paul

     @dalias Anyone can set 'Media cache retention period' in their Mastodon administration settings.

     Not only that, as I have in place auto purge of media cache https://masto.host/re-mastodon-media-storage/ for anyone hosted on Masto.host.

     Financially, it is much better to have someone pay me a small amount for years than to have them churn after a couple of months.

     Don't think it's a question of the right incentives.

     @pwaring

   • Embed this notice
     Masto.host (mastohost@mastodon.social)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 22:55:07 JST Masto.host

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Paul

     @dalias @pwaring No, there isn't. But that is something that would require Mastodon to support, not something I can easily do on my end.

     I don't develop Mastodon. I'm not even much of a code contributor because I know virtually nothing about Ruby/Rails.

     Even if that were possible, I'm not sure how much it would impact the user experience. Imagine opening the app (or every time you scroll) and having to wait for media to be fetched remotely and cached locally on the fly.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 22:55:07 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Masto.host
     • Paul

     @mastohost @pwaring I'm not blaming you for not having it. This is a longstanding problem with Mastodon. What it should be doing is prefetching only reasonable size images (downscaling if larger) and no video at all, and only pulling the full version on demand when expanded to full view or when attempting to play video.

   • Embed this notice
     Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)'s status on Wednesday, 30-Apr-2025 22:57:01 JST Rich Felker

     in reply to

     • Masto.host
     • Paul

     @mastohost @pwaring Sorry I worded my original comment about incentives a bit accusatory. I didn't mean to imply malicious intent just that pricing can create unwanted incentives against fixing problems if it externalizes the cost. But this isn't your problem to fix anyway, it's Mastodon's.

   • Embed this notice
     Masto.host (mastohost@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 01:12:58 JST Masto.host

     in reply to

     • Rich Felker
     • Paul

     @dalias @pwaring I understand and thank you :)

     But I agree that more should be done to make Mastodon more friendly for smaller instances. Media storage in larger instances is usually not a problem if you have a clean-up like I have for everyone on Masto.host.

     The cost of media storage on large instances is a small percentage, as remote media only needs to federate once for all users on a large instance. However, in a small instance, it's significant, and more should be done to address this.