AFAIK it's not much different as we will be downloading the picture to serve it here. It's one of the ways that fediverse servers do load balancing across the fediverse - each instance handles their own community's bandwidth usage.

[–] tuckerm@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Related question: does Lemmy allow admins to specify how long to keep media from other instances? Does it get automatically deleted after some time?

[–] szeraax@lemmy.dcrich.net 2 points 1 year ago

Good question! I don't know.

[–] Squiddles@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Related question for you: on the Animals and Pets community there's a sidebar requesting that images be uploaded elsewhere to lower the cost associated with hosting it locally. I made a post with an image hosted elsewhere (vgy.me), but the image on the finished post seems to be hosted from beehaw? I linked this URL, and my beehaw post is serving the image from this location.

Is it expected that beehaw/lemmy is rehosting the image? Or am I misunderstanding and it's something like a virtual file that's cached on beehaw temporarily and otherwise just passes through to the third party host? Just want to be as gentle on the servers as possible. Thanks!

[–] Lionir@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

So we found out after you posted this image that we cache the image anyways when it's being shown on Lemmy so we've decided to just remove that policy as it is practically useless. Thank you for the comment and thank you for the consideration!