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?
Right now you can only disable caching of nsfw content by disabling NSFW for the instance, but of course this has nothing to do with “soft” rules that are only written out in text.
Imo the best solution would be to allow admins to have more granular control over caching, e.g. disabling caching for specific instances / communities or whitelisting. And we need an option to disable caching altogether.