Lemmy doesn’t let you block whole instances as a non-admin user. Your only recourse is to block each community. I ended up using a script that queried all the communities on on the instance I disliked and just blocked them. It really sucks, but that’s our only recourse right now.

Media absolutely gets federated. My pictrs folder is 10GB. Another 10GB is the activity table, so I tip my hat to you for finding that. I still have a very significant amount of worthless data on my disk though

That’s a good point. I’ve just been assuming that the media is the issue, but perhaps it’s just the pure database 🤔 Does doing a truncate purge the media? If not, wouldn’t I just be orphaning all these pictures, etc that have been downloaded? Also what about the fallout of your own users? I don’t really want to drop the content that was created on the instance itself

I have been using lcs on another account for a small instance and it has been amazing for making the instance feel connected. Thanks!