It’s almost a productivity hack.

Ok, so Lemmy doesn’t cause the same amount of duplication, but I’d still argue that dedupe is valuable: it saves on hosting costs (your costs, in this case) and users will get a small advantage in having slightly higher cache hits.

Yes, for example go to https://infosec.exchange/explore

I see the top post as https://infosec.exchange/@nocontexttrek@mastodon.social/113433063621462027 and the image is https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/cache/media_attachments/files/113/433/063/582/671/258/original/71da3801e4e4f08c.png

The link is to the original on https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/433/062/676/773/993/original/f828afef5cc7ed1c.png but when you click image the javascript loads a modal with the local cached version (same image as the thumbnail that infosec.exchange loads.

There’s lots of different codebases across the fediverse so perhaps some hotlink, but local copies is the default.

I think the major advantage is the deduplication - when an image goes viral across Mastodon (or Lemmy) it’s currently stored hundreds or thousands of times, each with its own cost. Do you dedupe (for either your customers’ benefit or your own)?

The botsin.space Mastodon server shutting down is sad news, it’s a pretty important server and if you didn’t like bots it was handy that you could just block one server and block loads of them at once.

leaving Mastodon out to try

While it’s clear what’s meant from the context, I’ve never heard this idiom. Do you mean “hanging Mastodon out to dry”?

Drop in the bucket sounds weird to me too, but a quick check shows that it’s the US version of drop in the ocean.

I can see it from the three medium/small instances I just tried.

Also, is typigraphy a typo (typi?) or its own thing?