To clarify, when you or another user in your server follows a remote user, from that moment on, all new posts from that remote user start to federate with your server. By federate, you can think of a copy of those posts stored in the database.
If you follow 1000 remote users and another user on your server follows another 1000 remote users. Regarding database storage, we now have 2002 user posts that get saved in your database. As you can see, the local number of users in most cases influences little on the storage space needs of a Mastodon server. It does affect in terms of ‘Processing Threads’ (think CPU/RAM needed to handle requests), but it is probably not much unless they publish many thousands of posts or if they have a large following.
Media is the same, but I have automated a Mastodon provided script to do remote media cache cleanup, meaning that media files from remote servers are deleted locally after:
- 7 days for media files in posts
- 30 days for avatars/headers of inactive remote accounts
- 30 days for preview cards in links
- 90 days for preview cards in other media types (videos/photos)
So, it’s normal for the media storage to grow very fast in the first days, but after 7 days, the growth should start to slow down.
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Updated to include ’30 days for avatars/headers of inactive remote accounts‘ in March 2023.