Context: My 5 year+ old Mastodon instance has 25,000 real accounts - the retention has not been great - with 3000~ active users.
This results in my server retaining all of those “abandoned users” social graph including numerous remote follows not shared with any of the other active users.
Problem: The bandwidth required for handing all of the known accounts media is currently 6.6TB (3.3TB inbound + 3.3Tb uploading to wasabi), but I only seem to be serving 140GB of media to active users… so there is more than 3TB of… ghost remote media.
Brainstorm: Accounts that have not been logged into for 12+ months can be marked and federated as “sleeping”, and if sleeping local accounts are the only accounts on my instance following remote accounts… we should stop receiving toots/media which will not be visible to anybody.
Once the user returns, the sleeping account should hopefully continue to receive toots from the social graph they follow… (from that point forward)
Extra: This is obviously just one idea and is more of an open question about how the fediverse can handle these abandoned users.