Sort of. If you check the url of thumbnail images - they’ll all be from your local instance.
Some images are also federated. Take this post, for example. The link is to lemmy.world, but the thumbnail and image itself are served by lemmy.cafe.
I’ve never really delved into what exactly decides whether to federate a particular bit of content or not, but there’s definitely more than just text being stored.
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
Curious. That was not the case when I started using lemmy. It was page after page of thumbnails served by remote instances, showing up as empty frames since I block off-site media.
Since you mentioned it, though, I just checked: some of the images from remote posts are now showing up, since they’re hosted by my local instance.
This is an encouraging trend for users who care about privacy (and admins who don’t want their servers bearing the load of remote users). I wonder if it’s a configuration change that makes the difference, or a new feature in recent lemmy versions.
Illecors@lemmy.cafe 8 months ago
I know sdf had issues with media storage before, but that was late last year/early this one. There’s noy been an update to lemmy in the week that you’ve joined.
Also - welcome aboard!
mox@lemmy.sdf.org 8 months ago
But there have been updates since I started using lemmy, and since I often ignore thumbnails, an update might have changed this behavior while I was on a previous instance without my noticing.
Thanks!