Bandwidth is the issue, and server space. I wonder, can Lemmy servers be setup where say, someone runs an ass appreciation server. That server, when people post, sends the image to redgifs?
Then the server space issue is mute and porn, erotic art, video memes, etc can thrive.
You could just disable pict-rs in the config and instruct users to copy/paste the URL from another image host.
pict-rs supports using object storage so I think you could use any S3 compatible storage
I’m not sure how it works in rust and the framework Lemmy uses, but in many other ones like Django on python you can store all user uploaded files directly on S3 or somewhere and it will also automatically rewrite all links to those images to be served directly from there.
So yes it can be done and is done all the time in most web apps. But I’m not sure how to do it for Lemmy.
*moot
This could be done technically, at least as long as the real hoster (redgifs here) isn’t trying to stop automated uploads and isn’t going to ban the intermediate server.
But you’d probably have to hack around in the Lemmy code a bit because I don’t think it knows how to do this already.
