Each Fediverse server instance has its own local user accounts. But because they on a federated social-media network (called the Fediverse) with other server instances, each server instance needs some “awareness” of user accounts on other server instances.

Part of this “awareness” tends to be caching the profiles, bios, avatar images, etc, of user accounts on other server instances — i.e., remote user accounts.

Some of these images can be very large. And can cause the cache of remote user accounts to take up a lot of drive space. Which often translates to a higher monthly hosting costs.

This could apply to any Fediverse software.

But this particular example of it happened to Pixelfed.

The conversation started here:

https://mastodon.social/@mitexleo@buddyverse.xyz/111152253455206463

I also talked to Basit Ali (from #SpaceHost) about it, and he said:

There are different ways this could be addressed.