As far as I know Lemmy stores only text locally and images and such will be linked to the external instance. Text doesn't use much disk space, so that shouldn't be a big a problem. Sometimes when you browse Lemmy, you notice posts that have broken links to images. It's because the other instance is down, but you can still see the text portion of the posts on your home instance.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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I think it stores thumbnails in the pictrs directory by default.
The full firehose of the lemmyverse will grow your DB by about 2GB per day, plus an additional 8GB per day in thumbnails. And the rate is growing frantically. It's not necessarily trivial, depending on how much you subscribe to.
AFAIK the cached images are only of thumbnail size and get deleted after a few months
May be worth having a look at the ActivityPub protocol. It’s the way Lemmy instances (and other stuff!) communicate with one another. From there I think it will be clearer how a single Lenny instance could behave. https://activitypub.rocks
I have just setup an instance of Lemmy on my server. So if I federate to a community, all its posts will be stored on my server, also images and so on?
The terminology is that you federate with an instance and subscribe to a community.
And yes, if you sub a community, your instance will mirror posts and comments to your local DB and re-serve them to the public unauthenticated internet. On a single-user instance, anyone can browse the communities on your server and infer what your account subscribes to, including whatever porn, piracy, and other legally questionable shenanigans based on what gets replicated to your server.
Thank you. What about comments and posts that get updated/changed? Will my instance also reflect those changes?
Yeah, they get federated as a new edit message. Not sure whether they get stored in the db as edit entries, or if the DB actually just modifies the original... but edits federate.