The database of “1M comments” is taking less than 10GB of disk space. Looking at the last backup, the whole database uncompressed is 18GB. It’s running on commodity hardware. Even with the mirrors making copies of the images to object storage, my object storage bill this month was a whooping $0.66.
I guess if you just link the images from Reddit it’s not that computationally intensive. I very much doubt that Reddit is going to let this slide if Lemmy ever gets that big though.
Why shouldn’t at least try to do it?
Because there are things to lose, and this isn’t a risk-free process. I expanded more on my reasoning in my last paragraph:
If this bridging was an opt-in system, I’d be fine with it. But because it’s currently an opt-out system, and an opt-out system where you have to block hundreds of accounts, I really don’t like it. Perhaps a system to make these opt-in, like a menu in the settings to select which bridges you want enabled could be added to Lemmy, and I’d be fine with these mirror/bridge bots then. This is sort of like how it works on Matrix, and I like the bridging there. But with the current circumstances on Lemmy, I don’t like the mirror/bridge bots.