Just started self hosting this instance. Nothing on the docs mentioned anything about storage considerations.
It’s all about how many communities your user(s) subscribe to since your instance basically acts as a mirror for those.
My instance has been running for 23 days, and I am pretty much the only active local user:
7.3G pictrs
5.3G postgres
edit: I may have a slight Reddit Lemmy problem
So if you’re the only user (let’s assume for ease) then, that represents all the updates (posts, comments, votes) from each community that you are subscribed to?
Yeah, and I purposely subscribe to (or sometimes have a dedicated “federation helper bot” account I run subscribe to) most of the most popular communities on the most popular instances so I can get a decent sampling of what’s going on in the fediverse on the “All” feed. So I assume my storage usage is maybe a bit higher than what an “average” single-user instance may be…
Ooh, that’s a really good idea, I need a federation helper bot/account when I start self-hosting a Lemmy instance!
Do you also post stuff? I mean my instance is only about an hour old, but I’ve subscribed to some communities, yet I don’t see the picture service consuming the S3 storage I’ve configured
Lemmy caches every thumbnail of every post for like a month or something using Pictrs, so that storage will eventually hit a sort of equilibrium and start growing much more slowly (only reflecting post/thumbnail volume during the cache time).
Between profile images, community banners/icons, post images etc. there are probably a few dozen images that will be sticking around for the long haul at the moment.
