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?
Firstly: I was partially wrong about what gets cached, see my original comment.
There is an open pull request which is meant to give some options regarding media serving. Right now it’s only a rough sketch though and does not implement a lot functionality.