When do images get mirrored in the local instance's pictrs?
I'm running an instance for me and a couple of friends at https://lm.put.tf/. I've noticed that there seems to be no consistency whether or not post images are mirrored in instance's pictrs
Why is there a difference in behaviour? is it because the post was done from another instance and not lemmy.world? What is the replication/mirroring logic?
I think I figured out the reason. Thumbnail previews are generated by your local instances, in the first post I've linked, the meme is actually a link to https://i.imgflip.com/7rgf1k.jpg which the instance downloads and generates a thumbnail for.
On posts that are actual images uploaded to the instance (e.g. the second link I posted), it looks like that lemmy just reuses the URLs.
Ok yeah, I guess for external links direct to images it makes sense for the image to be retrieved by each instance. Still, its not intuitive behaviour and it doesn't seem to be widely understood at all.