Lemmy

Sadly not yet. Hopefully this will be improved in the future.

However, this sounds like you used one of these follow everything bots, which is just a bad idea as it results in these kind of issues.

I just took a look at the repository for pict-rs and unfortunately nothing in the official docs about cleaning up images. Did you happen to use a bot to assist you in finding communities? If so this might be the reason. After two weeks of running, my image size is only 2.2mb. I should also ask you what the size of your database is. The activity table can get awfully big and very quickly.

Imagine if media in Lemmy was all hosted in a distributed network filesystem like Iroh, where instances only function as inserters and exit nodes for that media.

This way, smaller instances can have a smaller cache corresponding to the media that was actually needed by it (recently). And independent peers can help by participating in the distributed file-system network without running instances themselves.

It would definitely be nice to have some image retention policy. If an image hasnt been accessed in say 6 months its probably safe to say I won’t care about it. And if need be it can pull it from the original server again.

Can you just run a cronjob to delete files in that directory every day?

(Maybe there's a reason you can't do this, I don't know how Lemmy instance works)