Option 3 is the only one that seems sustainable long term. Donations will NEVER keep up with user growth, thus storage costs will balloon out of control.

Completely avoiding any chance of illegal content touching the servers should immediately have everyone agreeing on this option. I doubt anyone here is willing to foot legal bills and as such even minor legal actions would be the end of this instance.

Privacy is nice but ip logging is the simplest form to “protect” against with even a free VPN. If those claiming privacy concerns here aren’t already using a VPN and are depending purely on lemme.ee’s proxy then their internet hygiene needs an update.

As for usability, the image being deleted from external provider presents the same issue to the user between option 2 and 3. The cache from option 2 will inventually get cleared and it’ll fail to pull a fresh copy if deleted from the external hosts.