It’s a feature of Lemmy where your instance will proxy image links for you, it can be useful in some cases to do things like bypass regional censorships (If you can access your home instance from your country, but not instance lemmy.example.com your home instance can proxy the image from lemmy.example.com so you can still see it (text is handled by federation already, so no proxy required for just text)) or to cache images in case an instance goes down
But it seems to be poorly implemented where it’s end user experience is a pain at best, and the more aggressive it’s set the more annoying it is.
Take for example this instance I’m currently on, infosec.pub, they seem to have it set to aggressively replace all image links including in comments no matter what.
So now my attempt to reply to this comment https://infosec.pub/comment/20590443 is utterly broken because the image service just doesn’t like it despite me just wanting to link to the off-site gif link manually typing the markdown instead.
A good thing about proxying is that it prevents auto-loading of resources from potentially malicious domains. For instance, I could make an image comment containing an image link to a server I control. When you reply to my comment, since you clearly have seen my comment, I can now look at my server logs and see the IP addresses of everyone who viewed my image. I now know that your IP address is in that list.
I’ve heard this security concern before, but I’m a bit confused about the real attack vector here. I mean let’s say you do this - you post an image to some random Lemmy instance and behind the scenes, you gather all the IPs which fetch the image. What malicious thing could you do with that? Genuinely curious.
Neither of those links display an image for me. One shows a tiny empty box in your comment and the other lands me on a weird little error page about “msg too wide”
Tenor in particular is shitty like that too. If I directly link to a tenor gif on discord, people have to click the link and open a webpage to view the gif. To embed it in discord I have to save it and upload it.
It’s a feature of Lemmy where your instance will proxy image links for you, it can be useful in some cases to do things like bypass regional censorships (If you can access your home instance from your country, but not instance lemmy.example.com your home instance can proxy the image from lemmy.example.com so you can still see it (text is handled by federation already, so no proxy required for just text)) or to cache images in case an instance goes down
But it seems to be poorly implemented where it’s end user experience is a pain at best, and the more aggressive it’s set the more annoying it is.
Take for example this instance I’m currently on, infosec.pub, they seem to have it set to aggressively replace all image links including in comments no matter what.
So now my attempt to reply to this comment https://infosec.pub/comment/20590443 is utterly broken because the image service just doesn’t like it despite me just wanting to link to the off-site gif link manually typing the markdown instead.
This is what that gif looks like proxied:
https://infosec.pub/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.ibb.co%2F8gHKNsT1%2Fmichael-scott-why.gif
A good thing about proxying is that it prevents auto-loading of resources from potentially malicious domains. For instance, I could make an image comment containing an image link to a server I control. When you reply to my comment, since you clearly have seen my comment, I can now look at my server logs and see the IP addresses of everyone who viewed my image. I now know that your IP address is in that list.
I’ve heard this security concern before, but I’m a bit confused about the real attack vector here. I mean let’s say you do this - you post an image to some random Lemmy instance and behind the scenes, you gather all the IPs which fetch the image. What malicious thing could you do with that? Genuinely curious.
Hack their Gibson of course.
Exactly this.
Neither of those links display an image for me. One shows a tiny empty box in your comment and the other lands me on a weird little error page about “msg too wide”
Yeah, because the proxy has decided it doesn’t like it
This is what I actually wanted to link to/embed
https://i.ibb.co/8gHKNsT1/michael-scott-why.gif
Well actually I originally tried with a direct tenor link
https://tenor.com/bdBiU.gif
But it didn’t like that either
Tenor in particular is shitty like that too. If I directly link to a tenor gif on discord, people have to click the link and open a webpage to view the gif. To embed it in discord I have to save it and upload it.
X-Firefox-Spdy: h2 access-control-expose-headers: vary, date, content-length, content-encoding, content-type cache-control: public, max-age=60 content-encoding: br content-type: application/json date: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:10:57 GMT server: nginx vary: accept-encoding, Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Connection: keep-alive DNT: 1 Host: infosec.pub Priority: u=0, i Referer: https://piefed.social/ Sec-Fetch-Dest: document Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate Sec-Fetch-Site: cross-site Sec-Fetch-User: ?1 Sec-GPC: 1 TE: trailers Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0
The proxy link returns a funny error; “too wide.”
It’s a gif of OP’s mom
I was wondering why your reply shows up empty on my instance.
Interesting, I can comment on piefed (just did a test) to the comment above. But I get a new tab when I try to see the proxy link.