Say you decide to self-host a Lemmy instance. When you create that instance, do you immediately need to download and store all the data that has ever been posted to all federated Lemmy instances? Or perhaps you only need to download and store everything that is posted to the federated Lemmy instances from that point forward? Or better yet, do you only store what the users on that instance do (i.e. their posts, and posts to the communities hosted on that instance)?
Getting too far into the weeds for me to answer with full confidence. I’d look into the Self-Hosting communities.
Oh, am I misunderstanding the purpose of this community? I thought its purpose was for people to post content regarding the “Lemmy” service as a whole: questions, educational content, problems, PSA’s etc. I assumed it was a sort of “meta” community for the Lemmy service.
This is a fine place, if you don’t mind waiting for answers. Average users probably don’t know that much more than I do though. The Self-Hosting guys probably just have threads talking about stuff like this, which you wouldn’t have to wait for.