Tiff

Lemmy is still saving thumbnails and (previously) sometimes the whole image! The majority of image issues have been cleared up in my opinion and it works very well. Nearly all of our hosts allow hotlinking as it’s basically required for our use cases.

Lemmy also knows when the image is another Lemmy instance (through “magic”, or just cross posting). So if you upload once and then use that same link on all other posts then that would still be the same.

The problem I think you have is your usecase also includes posting externally to Lemmy. & to some extent, you don’t want those images tied to your Lemmy account. If my users post via my instance then they are welcome to also hotlink the images externally. This is only possible because Reddthat uses a CDN and caches the images as much as possible.

Even if we didn’t use a cdn there are plenty of VPS’ and proxy software that we could use which would transparently function in the same way. You could even setup your own VPS, some image hosting software like https://chibisafe.moe/ or https://github.com/nokonoko/Uguu or https://github.com/hauxir/imgpush

To sum up:

• post once to Lemmy instance and then use that image everywhere
• use a random image host that allows hotlinking to do the same
• get your own VPS, setup an image upload and use that (and maybe get a domain too!)

The 3rd option you can do completely anonymously via crypto.