A server is just a computer. We run our own Mastodon instance, the server for it is literally an old desktop sitting under our desk! (It was running on our gaming desktop until we bought an old small office PC for dedicated servering and moved our stuff over to that.)
It does have a hard drive, and it can in theory fill up, but like, text is TINY. Really tiny. and hard drives are big. You aren’t gonna fill anything up by posting a ton.
Pictures and especially video take up a LOT more space. On our Mastodon, 99% of the space is the remote media cache, which can be cleared out without issue (because the other server it came from still has a copy of it, in theory), and it has a procedure for clearing that out. The actual stuff we’ve uploaded ourselves doesn’t take up nearly as much space (but it’s a server just for us, if we had a lot of random people on it we’d probably need way more disk space).
Things get significantly more expensive if your server is a VM in “the cloud” (someone else’s computer in a datacenter). They charge monthly for that, and usually don’t give you much storage (we have a small VPS mostly as a bounce point but our email is also there, and it has a 20GB disk, compared to the 500GB disk that’s in our physical server machine). You can buy extra storage but they charge monthly for that, too.
But all that is stuff for the instance admins to worry about. If they need more infrastructure costs they can always ask for donations or something.
A server is just a computer. We run our own Mastodon instance, the server for it is literally an old desktop sitting under our desk! (It was running on our gaming desktop until we bought an old small office PC for dedicated servering and moved our stuff over to that.)
It does have a hard drive, and it can in theory fill up, but like, text is TINY. Really tiny. and hard drives are big. You aren’t gonna fill anything up by posting a ton.
Pictures and especially video take up a LOT more space. On our Mastodon, 99% of the space is the remote media cache, which can be cleared out without issue (because the other server it came from still has a copy of it, in theory), and it has a procedure for clearing that out. The actual stuff we’ve uploaded ourselves doesn’t take up nearly as much space (but it’s a server just for us, if we had a lot of random people on it we’d probably need way more disk space).
Things get significantly more expensive if your server is a VM in “the cloud” (someone else’s computer in a datacenter). They charge monthly for that, and usually don’t give you much storage (we have a small VPS mostly as a bounce point but our email is also there, and it has a 20GB disk, compared to the 500GB disk that’s in our physical server machine). You can buy extra storage but they charge monthly for that, too.
But all that is stuff for the instance admins to worry about. If they need more infrastructure costs they can always ask for donations or something.
– Frost