I have images disabled in my browser and also in my profile. So I should only be getting text when browsing a Lemmy server, and it should be compressed because TLS is in play and compression is usually/conventionally done before encryption (or so I thought). Animated GIFs are immune to my settings but I did not notice any.

After a couple(?) hours of activity involving mostly reading and writing and not a crazy amount of searching or jumping around, my session consumed ~65mb. That seems like a lot for just text. Hi-res binary images are often around 1 mb, so it seems a bit off that my text-only session would use the equivalent of 65 hi-res pics.

To give an idea of sizes, I have a text file holding 260 of my posts going back several months. The uncompressed size is 558k. It seems very unlikely that I would have read that many posts/comments in 2 hours. So 65mb is at least 2 orders of magnitude more bandwidth consumption than I would expect.

With probably 95+% of fedi ppl on quasi unlimited broadband, probably no one pays attention to this.

Any theories? I had a few different accounts open from different nodes. So I wonder if the JavaScript client code is where all the fat is, which must be fetched upon every single login. Would the stock Lemmy client code be as big as 10mb compressed? A few nodes have some kind of anti-bot thing that runs. I wonder if that has some network fat.