

So far no one has mentioned this, but typically images or other uploads only exist on the original server. When lemm.ee went down, all the content those users uploaded was lost.
The text content of posts and comments is copied across all the linked servers, but the images aren’t. Some instances will proxy images from a short term cache, but it’s far too expensive to store the images permanently.




If big tech are the issue, then try this robots.txt (yes on github…): https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt
My issue is with the scrapers pretending to be something they aren’t. Tens of thousands of requests, spread over IPs, mostly from China and Singapore but increasingly from South America.