Gfycat is shutting down, sadly. There’s no money to be had in hosting pictures and videos for other sites that are viewed without ads. We already saw the Imgur clamp down a month or so ago. If these instances can’t self host the content it’s all going to have an invisible expiration date.

This is the best idea in my opinion. Even on Reddit people used Imgur a bunch. It would be cool if either Lenny itself, or the various apps that have sprung up tied into an API for Imgur or similar to store pictures/videos, then it would be seamless to the end user.

EDIT: looks like Memmy on iOS actually already does this!

I was wrong about what gets cached: media that is hosted directly on remote instances is not cached, while media from outside sources (imgur etc.) is cached and served from that cache.

So, from a small instance's point of view, the best case scenario would be if everyone used Lemmy's own media hosting exclusively. But that would, of course, greatly increase the storage requirements of larger instances.

The issue is that if they shut down or change policies we get bit rot. Idk though it’s starting to sound pretty good.