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.
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.