What are the alternatives here? “Proxying external images” isn’t finding any hits in my brain - would you mind explaining what you mean by that?
The one alternative I’m aware of (maybe this is what you meant, idk) is caching images and delivering that version to end users, but I’m not sure if that’s currently considered worthwhile and/or ethical coding.
Proxying external images means that instead of the image being downloaded from the original link, your Lemmy server would download it and serve it for you. The Lemmy server acts as a proxy.
But it means performing a lot of extra traffic. And realistically you’d want to cache the image because otherwise your server will likely get banned for the high volume of requests you send. But caching the images requires more storage and can have potential for legal issues.
And images are one thing, but literally any content is the problem. Images are just the most obvious because they often load without even having to click on the image and thus you’ll get far higher volume of user data. Literally anything you link to has this issue and you cannot proxy all of it.
What are the alternatives here? “Proxying external images” isn’t finding any hits in my brain - would you mind explaining what you mean by that?
The one alternative I’m aware of (maybe this is what you meant, idk) is caching images and delivering that version to end users, but I’m not sure if that’s currently considered worthwhile and/or ethical coding.
Proxying external images means that instead of the image being downloaded from the original link, your Lemmy server would download it and serve it for you. The Lemmy server acts as a proxy.
But it means performing a lot of extra traffic. And realistically you’d want to cache the image because otherwise your server will likely get banned for the high volume of requests you send. But caching the images requires more storage and can have potential for legal issues.
And images are one thing, but literally any content is the problem. Images are just the most obvious because they often load without even having to click on the image and thus you’ll get far higher volume of user data. Literally anything you link to has this issue and you cannot proxy all of it.