As I was browsing lemmy and the fediverse at large, this question kept popping into my head.
Since multimedia files have a much bigger footprint than raw text, it made me feel worried since as time goes, massive resources will be needed to keep up with the big data coming in.
I do wonder if the instances have taken the route of the cloud and just decided to put all of it in something like AWS S3? Or maybe they use self hosted storage with something like minio for object storage?
I was wrong about what gets cached: media that is hosted directly on remote instances is not cached, while media from outside sources (imgur etc.) is cached and served from that cache.
So, from a small instance’s point of view, the best case scenario would be if everyone used Lemmy’s own media hosting exclusively. But that would, of course, greatly increase the storage requirements of larger instances.