Pleroma can be configured to do it too, it just requires a beefier server than most of us are willing to pay for lol (plus the potential liability of caching an illegal image on your server)
Ah yes because this concern never occurs with #Mastodon lol
Just because they don’t think about it, doesn’t mean they’re not liable… a lot of things go unenforced, or selectively enforced. If you’re even moderately dissident I recommend avoiding things like that.
Does it require more powerful hardware than #Mastodon would?
No idea, I think poa.st is the largest Pleroma instance and graf had to invest quite a bit into hardware, so it’s very possible. Pleroma makes it possible to run on very modest hardware, but it may have different scaling properties as user counts inscrease.
we have always mediaproxied everyone's media except ones which regularly host borderline illegal content which are listed on our about page. everything else is cached but we also have multiple AMD EPYC servers and multiple 10gbps uplinks
mastodon stops what it's doing to transcode files to be more 'web friendly' (friendly to iToddlers who's devices still don't fully support WEBM a decade later). each one of those WEBM uploaded the server transcodes using ffmpeg which uses, at minimum a single thread each file. multiply that by a dozen or more and mastodon becomes crippled and no longer responds to queries
we switched to pleroma for that
soapbox was a welcome addition i found out about after the fact while trying to migrate our database
@kreyren Yep, it sucks that #Pleroma and #Soapbox don't use cached media like #Mastodon does. The network sees me use social.teci.world and see queries to dozens of different sites, but if I use social.freetalklive.com, they just see that one instance.