Either a local SMTP server (less used) or an external service (more common). The SMTP is configurable but I believe most used option is ssl smtp over port 587.

You font make any communities and clear the database of cached content thats no longer needed after reasonable amount of time (as its hosted on the other instances the data came from) eg: PGPASSWORD=password psql --dbname=database --username=username --command=“DELETE FROM activity WHERE published < NOW() - INTERVAL ‘7 days’;”

Does stop top month or top year since you dont have data going that far back. Obviously if you keep it then you need more disk space, memory and so on and so on.

Yes but only if you have a lot of users eventually. So your server can serve up hundreds of requests from several different federated servers (eg: maybe some content from beehaw, other content from lemmy.world) instead of 1 server (maybe lemmy.world) having to serve that same content 100 times from all over the place.

If its only you and no other users, then not.

I used this and the developer is very helpful. Works great. Helped me even upgrade to 0.18.0.

Thank you :)

I setup a server that does not store any data so as to keep browsing fast for people using it. Its at lemmy.myserv.one and you can try it. Nothing really is posted there so it’s basically just so you can no overload another instance like lemmy.world.

Hi - can you help me set this up or share the script that you use to do this? Many thanks :)