Big instances surfing up content from smaller instances is invariably going to cripple them unless larger instances start locally caching that content.
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Now that is purely passive, just data collection from routine serving of images.
A rogue site could start serving crafted images to confuse users or cause NSFW content to appear on all other Lemmy sites where users were browsing a meme.
When you have small-time image hosts being used by the dozens, they likely aren't as worried about their reputation being burned by pranks like this.
IP Address isn’t extremely precise, and I always run on the latest version of whatever browser I’m on, be it Safari or Edge.
This applies to any website. by visiting the website you give them your IP. the only way to mitigate this is to use a VPN.
A "solution" to this might be for lemmy instances/apps to have the option to "load remote images" the way e-mail providers do. So I have to actively click to load the images. Could even be done per subscription, so I could declare that I just want everything loaded when I see lemmy.ml/c/pics but not in general, where I usually want text.