Had a shower thought / question about #ActivityPub. Would it be possible to develop a federated server without a media cache? I believe that it should be as long as the server is configured to proxy media requests back to the original source. This would, of course, greatly increase latency and decrease reliability (media is lost if the remote instance goes poof). But in exchange, it dramatically reduces the storage space needed to run an instance. That would reduce the cost of operating an instance on cheap VPS services. I can also think of a couple use cases around the current push to simplify instance hosting.
Anyone have thoughts on this? I'd love to hear them!
#MastoDev #FediDev #Fediverse #Federation