Things you post publicly online just aren’t private

Couldn’t images and videos just be loaded from the instance they were uploaded to instead of getting copied to each instance? It would work almost the same as uploading it to a file hoster but it would be a lot easier usability wise and illegal content would still only have to be deleted at a single point.

Of course they can but what would be the point of that? It would just cost storage space.

Lemmy is not storing anything for no reason tho, there’s no point in that without advertising. The only data they could hand over would be public anyway.