Asklemmy

My understanding is that images don't federate by default and you'll load the image from whichever server it was uploaded to initially. Uploading an image here in the comment certainly does that:

This post that shows in my instance loads it's image from feddit.uk, even when it shows on my own instance rather than on this URL:

https://feddit.uk/post/5813

Looking at the federation docs, I'm pretty confident that a link to the image is the only thing going through. If someone uploads that on the server directly, that'll be a link to that server, but it may be a link to Imgur or something too.

yes, they are hosted on the server that is running the Lemmy instance. But every other instance that is linked to that instance will 'scrape' all posts incl images and store them on they're own server. So posts and images are served from the instance you yourself are a member of

the docs don't explicitly specify but you can see in the image url that they do end up on the instance you upload to

If you run the normal Ansible setup, there's one docker container running pictrs that's going to handle the image uploads. By default, it stores it into a volume that comes from the server's filesystem. So when you upload an image, it gets stored to the server's file system with the default settings.

Pictrs supports object storage, and you can get it to store the images to any S3 compatible storage.