Hey fellow Lemmings,

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day! Today, I’m thrilled to share some exciting news with you about a new feature that’s being implemented across our beloved Lemmy platform. The team (aka myself), is introducing a site-wide Image Proxy Filter to bolster user privacy and prevent any potential leakage of IP addresses.

If you have been on Lemmy for awhile, you would have known that image and thumbnails requests currently all serve from the original instance. This means, even if you are on lemmy.kya.moe, you would still be requesting images and thumbnails from other instances, hence leaking your IP address.

As you can imagine, this is very bad for privacy, and even though there is currently work ongoing to bring about a native image proxy to the software stack, it is likely not to see release in the next couple of weeks. As such, the team (aka myself), has implemented an in-line filtering system to replace all media links with an external image proxy.

The way it works is simple:

  • Anonymized Requests: Whenever you browse on lemmy.kya.moe, instead of your device receiving the original image URL, the web server being used, filters and returns a modified URL that wraps the original URL in an image proxy caching service. Your client/browser then accesses that image proxy caching service, instead of the original instance/host hosting that image, thereby masking your browsing and IP address from the other instances (e.g. lemmy.ml, lemmy.world, beehaw.org).

  • Image Caching: To improve performance and reduce server load on other instances, the proxy server used also caches images and media temporarily. So, if multiple users access the same content, the proxy serves it from its own cache, minimizing redundant requests to the hosting server.

  • Geo-distribution: The image proxy is served from behind Cloudflare. While this may not appeal to some of you, it is the easiest, fastest and cheapest (remember, I am not funded) way to serve images in a performant manner across the globe.

Lemmy@きゃ/kya.moe is committed to user privacy and safety, and this new feature is a testament to that dedication. By deploying the image proxy filter, we (as in myself), are taking significant steps to protect your personal data and create a safer online environment for all Lemmings.

We’re (again, myself) continuously working on improving your Lemmy experience, and this is just one of many initiatives in our roadmap. As always, your feedback is crucial to us, and we welcome your thoughts and suggestions on how we can make Lemmy an even better place for everyone.

**If you encounter any issues, please comment to this post, with the affected post/comment/image URL.

Cheers

Note: This entire post was mostly entirely written by ChatGPT, because I’m too lazy.