I found this interesting and was wondering how some of the larger instances handle the issues they outline such as
Copyright/DMCA Safe Harbor CSAM Law enforcement/warrants/info inquiries
And not included (since it’s focus is on US legal issues) but I’m curious about would be other regulations such as EU user data retention
My understanding is that the actual full size image is held just on the source instance, but that thumbnails are cached on other instances for a time.
But looking into the official documentation there seem to be json files missing and the descriptions are not completly clear: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/contributors/05-federation.html#post
And just looking around using inspect element to see the HTML source it seems that even the thumbnail is not cached for external directly hosted on lemmy image posts. But then again I also could the the preview of a image post earlier while the full size image was not visible as the hosting lemmy instance was offline.