Yep. Add in a 3rd instance and now you have 3 copies of the database, essentially. It's just that each instance is responsible about telling the fediverse when updates occur to communities on their instance.
I would guess it's A LOT smaller than you'd expect. Especially if you're just talking about posts and comments and not any uploaded images. The images themselves I can guarantee you is probably many orders of magnitude greater than the size of the conversations.
The post is a few years old and is quoting data that is a few years older still... but assuming that they've doubled in size since, there's only 10TB of data for text, comments, etc... (i.e. no images).
Now I'm assuming this is compressed btw. (The link in the post is dead so I can't actually check out the file and see what's in there).
Thanks. Wonder how much it would be uncompressed but I guess that doesnt matter as you can probably compress it on your fediverse instance until it is required to be accessed by a user