I think this could be a ticking DOS time bomb.

Someone manages to spam upload massive files to the largest Lemmy instances could wipe out a ton of smaller ones.

Not to mention scalability wise this seems like a nightmare… eventually the largest Lemmy instances will have petabytes of media data with 100s of gbs coming in per day, giving other instances no chance to sync with them.

I think the system architecture needs a significant review. This won’t scale.

And done. I love federation.