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The #fediverse has a problem, and I’m going to be very unhelpful in not having an idea how to fix it.
Once an instance gets popular, it’s processing, storage and traffic costs get prohibitive for the people running it.
I regularly see reports of #mastodon instances shutting down because the admins can no longer afford the hosting costs. This will only be worse when #pixelfed and #loops spin up.
The home instances of those applications will have higher costs than mastodon due to being so media rich, and mastodon instances that federate with them will be similarly impacted in the amount of media they receive and need to cache.
The software is free, but hosting and time isn’t 
Possible solutions:
- strictly limit the number of users on your instance?
- better tools for managing caching of media?
- more efficient/lower quality (eg smaller) media
@WiteWulf I don't know if there's a benefit to the archiving of old posts. Perhaps a rolling 6 month deletion point, with the option for user export prior to that?
@InTheseHeels I think that’s a move in the right direction, definitely. The length would need to be dictated/balanced by the number of users, volume of data, and costs.
6mos might work for smaller instances, but I suspect much shorter would be needed for larger ones running on a tight budget.