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Its a feature not a bug :)
My issue is lemmy.world (and other bigger instances) is so big that it was just slamming my tiny personal lemmy then later piefed server, so I had to give up. There was a HUGE queue of changes for my little instance of one user.
I think the database load improved with recent versions. You can also try disabling synchronous_commit in postgres to make your database like 5x faster.
Instances only send you content for communities you (or someone on your instance) are subscribed to. If you don't care about politics you could probably subscribe to a bunch of smaller communities and not have an issue.
In general though Lemmy needs a lot of disk space, best to configure pictrs not to store images which helps a lot, but the database can still be huge.
By far the most space is taken up by votes. You can disable votes (1.0 will have more options), or delete them directly from the database.
Yeah I guess the issue is that votes are the thing that makes Lemmy what it is. Without them it's just a stream of posts with no ranking. Hard to avoid needing that space.
It's not a huge amount of space, but if you're on a cheap VPS then they don't come with much space.
You could write a query to votes for remote posts older than 6 months, or something similar.
True, that would probably help a lot.
Or instead of individual votes do a dump like an rss. Like only update when I ask every 10 minutes or so. Get everything from x - y time and just give me the totals. Probably only good for smaller instances though.
Its not that easy because users can undo their votes, or change an upvote to downvote. Thats why we store every individual vote in the database. Also votes from defederated instances are discarded, which wouldnt work if there is only a total vote count from the community. And in general Activitypub is push-based, not pull-based.