In order to improve interoperability with Mastodon and other microblogging platforms, Lemmy now automatically includes a hashtag with new posts.
👎🏻 No way to disable this if I don't want hashtags cluttering up my posts. And worse, it's Lemmy putting words in my mouth / speaking for me.
[Re: Image Proxying] The setting works by rewriting links in new posts, comments and other places when they are inserted in the database. This means the setting has no effect on posts created before the setting was activated. And after disabling the setting, existing images will continue to be proxied. It should also be considered experimental.
What an absolutely stupid way to do image proxying. Why not just dynamically re-write image URLs to use the proxy path before serving it via the API?
That way:
It works with all content posted any time before/after the setting was activated
It lets users decide whether they want to proxy or not
Doesn't break images if the home instance pict-rs is broken (which I've been seeing a lot of lately)
If you think "that's not reliable" or "too hard", I've been doing it successfully exactly that way in Tesseract with it's image proxy/cache for over 8 months (on the front end...in a cave...with a box of scraps).
Yeah the image proxy will stay off for me. Mangling user's posts permanently is unacceptable, it's like the whole HTML escaping thing again. You always want to store the original data in its original form that way you have the freedom to tweak the processing at runtime, and if you fuck it up the data isn't permanently fucked up (again, like the 0.18 HTML crap that should never have happened).
“The hashtag is based on the community name, so posts to /c/lemmy will automatically have the hashtag #lemmy. This makes Lemmy posts much easier to discover.”
This is about proxying external images, URL rewrite won't work unless the image is also downloaded and hosted by the instance (which seems even worse for many reasons).
Or am I missing something here?
I've done exactly what I described in my comment for the last 8 months: it's been a UI feature of Tesseract since last October.
It proxies any image or direct video from any source you haven't blacklisted. If you have the proxy option enabled in your settings, all image URLs are re-written to go through the proxy. If not, then it uses the regular URL directly. It also caches with an admin-defined policy.
And anywhere it renders an image (markdown, posts, avatars/icons, banners, etc), the image source is set via imageProxyURL(url). There's extra optional params for size and format if the image source is served by pict-rs.