@jakob I'm surprised by the temporary drops between 4-5 PM and midnight every day, but other than that, Peer-To-Peer has solid limits when it comes to responsiveness. Downloading a large file over several hours? Not a problem. Showing images and videos in a scrolling timeline? Not so much.

The local storage of remote media by servers already is a band-aid to alleviate bandwidth issues. At Friendica we used to store locally all media to be able to display them in a privacy-respecting manner (meaning users' IP wouldn't be transmitted to remote servers. But some admins complained about the storage demands, so we added a switch to disable this, which requests all post media from remote servers. We now only store locally remote profile pictures and banners.

I don't know what Pixelfed is doing in that regard but it looks like they may still be at the "proxy all the things" stage.