this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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I purge 2 weeks old media using these. Then I purge the largest rooms' history events using these. Then I compress the DB using this.
It looks like this:
And periodically I run vacuum;
Thank you for the queries. The rhetorical question is why isn't the server handling this.
I don't know, can't speak for the devs. It is weird that if you don't implement these API calls buried a bit deep in the wiki, you end up storing every meme and screenshot anybody posted on any instance for the rest of time. But I found these through issue reports with many people asking for these to be implemented by default with for instance a simple setting "purge after X days" and a list of rooms to include or exclude from the history clean-up.
are the media files redownloaded from other servers when someone tries to load them? I guess all local media is lost forever, but maybe not remote ones
In my understanding that's the idea, the local ones are lost unless another federated instances synced them. As for the remote ones, maybe they're backed up but I really don't care for an instant messaging platform to not have a rear view past 2 weeks.
I don't think the homeserver tries to fetch media remotely that was local but since deleted
we often talk about how discord is a black hole of information, but this is worse than that