Instances only send you content for communities you (or someone on your instance) are subscribed to. If you don't care about politics you could probably subscribe to a bunch of smaller communities and not have an issue.

In general though Lemmy needs a lot of disk space, best to configure pictrs not to store images which helps a lot, but the database can still be huge.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

By far the most space is taken up by votes. You can disable votes (1.0 will have more options), or delete them directly from the database.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

Yeah I guess the issue is that votes are the thing that makes Lemmy what it is. Without them it's just a stream of posts with no ranking. Hard to avoid needing that space.

It's not a huge amount of space, but if you're on a cheap VPS then they don't come with much space.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

You could write a query to votes for remote posts older than 6 months, or something similar.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 2 points 1 hour ago

True, that would probably help a lot.