Are there smaller fedora base images available?
The Fedora images are rather large relatively speaking. Some of that is using glibc instead of the minimalist musl replacement. But it’s also a bunch of cross-dependencies for core packages that is hard to untangle. This isn’t necessarily as bad as it seems, because in many practical deployments you’ll end up needing a lot of them anyway across different applications.
We did have an initiative around minimizing the set a few years ago — see Making sure you're not a bot!.
As you can see above, I’ve moved my proposal here to a Project Discussion topic, where it’s really more useful.
are you trying to build on the existing fedora bootc images?
You may find Base images :: Fedora Docs interesting. Fedoras bootc base image is quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:40
We’re discussing this in Supportable customizable base images (#32) · Issues · fedora / bootc / Issue Tracker · GitLab