I don’t know what “image proxying” is. Can someone give me the q&d?
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
Neither of those links display an image for me. One shows a tiny empty box in your comment and the other lands me on a weird little error page about “msg too wide”
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
But it didn’t like that either
"code": "validate-width", "msg": "Too wide" }``` stripped the headers, your image didn't make it through the infosec.pub proxy.X-Firefox-Spdy: h2 access-control-expose-headers: vary, date, content-length, content-encoding, content-type cache-control: public, max-age=60 content-encoding: br content-type: application/json date: Fri, 27 Feb 2026 02:10:57 GMT server: nginx vary: accept-encoding, Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br, zstd Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 Connection: keep-alive DNT: 1 Host: infosec.pub Priority: u=0, i Referer: https://piefed.social/ Sec-Fetch-Dest: document Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate Sec-Fetch-Site: cross-site Sec-Fetch-User: ?1 Sec-GPC: 1 TE: trailers Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:140.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/140.0
