Update - September 3, 2025
Hello again! After almost a year of working on it, we've finally started on phase one of this process. It took a long time to get bugs ironed out that would let us safely remove the older data we planned to remove. This was complicated by our data storage almost doubling to just under 6TB!
We have removed media cache that is older than 360 days right now and everything appears to be working as intended. We will let this sit for at least a week, likely longer, and then proceed with removing the cache that is older than 180 days. If you have any problems at all, please reach out so we can help.
Hello! It's been a fun two years of social.ridetrans.it on the Fediverse. Your friendly volunteer admin team has learned a lot and we've gotten to a reliable, stable host and consistent flow of posts.
During those two years, storage use has crept up as the Fediverse has gotten more popular. Our Mastodon server stores not only your posts, pictures, and videos, but also the posts, pictures, and videos of everyone you follow. The posts and other data we store from other Mastodon servers is a 'cache', and large amount of it never even gets looked at. We now store well over three terabytes (3TB) of content; most of it is cached content. While not a major cost, we are now storing well over three terabytes (3TB) of content. Such a large data set makes it impossible to reliably plan for possible problems, as (for example) there's no effective way to back up that much data from our storage provider.
What's changing
On September 29th, 2024, we plan to run a script that will remove from cached storage all but the most recent 100 days of media and preview cards cached from other Fedi servers. To be absolutely clear, this will not remove anything about your posts, nor will it remove the text or links to posts on other servers. This process deletes our cached copy of older post content from other Mastodon servers.
Before this change takes effect, we do plan on requesting a full archive from our storage provider. However, we cannot guarantee that any media from this will be restorable on an individual basis.
Why?
As mentioned above, the sheer unwieldy nature of storing over 3TB of data in a block storage provider is concerning. We cannot do an effective backup of this data in case something (very) unlikely happens to the provider, so we are dependent on their reliability practices.
Our tests have shown that reducing our retention time for cached media to 100 days will drop storage use to under 0.6TB, which is something we can backup on a monthly or quarterly basis if we do need to change hosts. The cost of storage will also drop from over $20/month to approximately $5.
Considerations
Posts you have boosted/liked and posts from the people you follow will still be visible, but the related photos and videos will no longer be cached if older than 100 days. Viewing those older posts will require re-downloading the photos and videos, which should happen automatically. However, in some limited cases--primarily if the other server has gone offline or changed its file paths--the media won't be able to be fetched from the other Fediverse server. Thus, we recommend if you have any favorite posts bookmarked under "social.ridetrans.it" that you save a copy just in case this rare case happens to a post you vitally want to save.
Comments?
If you'd like to ask questions or you have concerns, feel free to DM one of the admins or send us an email. You can find the list and email here. We genuinely mean it! If you see a problem with this that we missed in our testing, please tell us so we can fix it or answer your concern.