Sure, lemmy.ml and lemmy.zip both use an image proxy, so we take a copy of the image from the remote server and give that to you instead of a direct link to the remote server (better for user privacy by stopping things like tracking pixels, ip leaks etc).

In this case, it was an image from imgur that lemmy.ml was already proxying via the lemmy.ml server, which we were then trying to proxy from lemmy.ml. I’m not entirely sure what the issue is with lemmy.ml, but we’d appeared to have a rate limit and we couldn’t get a copy of that image from lemmy.ml. Instead, we now bypass the proxy from lemmy.ml and just serve their image from their proxy instead, as it’s already doing the exact same thing ours is. The trade off is that you have to visit lemmy.ml to get that image (same as you would for most other linked images on the web) but at least the image works.