in any case, it still seems good practice to host sensitive images externally so you retain more control and don't have to rely on the shifting (and feasibly changeable, by bad actors) vagaries of mastodon federation rules
@Josephine perhaps. that'd require devs tho, right? (main devs or yr local ones, who'd then have to maintain their changes w/ each new masto version that rolls out)
@alyx could this just be solved by hosting the images on your local instance server and just have the images URLs propagate in federation?