RE: https://mementomori.social/@rolle/116125657344469470

Now would be an excellent time for @Mastodon devs to prioritize the inclusion of tootctl-style status and media clearing options in the default Admin interface. These issues have been sitting open on GitHub for literal years at this point.

Across the network, we need better and more accessible means of managing database and media storage sizes to keep costs more affordable and to reduce server closures. This need is only becoming more and more pressing as infrastructure costs climb.

In case you're a non-admin user and not familiar with what those features are:

Database storage holds all posts that a server has ever seen - everything posted there, everything that's ever passed through the Federated Feed, etc.

Media storage is all the photos, videos, and audio files that have been included in posts - they are stored separately and effectively linked to by their respective posts.

Tootctl clearing is a method of purging old posts or media which originated on other servers and have never been interacted with by anyone on the server doing the clearing - the posts have never been Favorited, Boosted, Bookmarked, or replied to by users on that server.

Imagine a small server that's well connected to the rest of the Fediverse - seeing and storing thousands of posts per day while their users only make or interact with dozens to hundreds per day.

Now imagine all that chaff keeps building up day after day, month after month, year after year. That's the Mastodon software default.