Yea I know there are certainly tangible benefits like privacy, censorship bypass, caching etc

But the crux of the issue

using ffmpeg in the background to recompile the image which will crash and burn it the image has even the slightest issue/corruption.

Does it really need to do all that? IMO it’s a proxy and it should just proxy things, not mess with things. Some basic checks at the most to just verify the image is an image and reject non-images, but that’s it. If there’s a need to also manipulate images then it should be handled separately

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

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