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.