I feel like there isn't a real way to fix this, since lemmy isn't a single service, like I can choose any image host I want. The only way I could think of would be to have your instance download the images but that's currently not even support on the mastodon alike platforms even. The only thing you can do on Mastodon that I'm aware of is cache the images on your own server which could get costly

Even without instance proxy, it should easy enough on the client side to not pull remote images unless directed to do so, similar to most email clients these days. At least it gives people a warning that they're passing data to a 3rd party location.

Holy shit. How do we avoid this? VPN?

Jokes on you! I use a Firefox extension that spoofs my browser profile. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chameleon-ext/

All these people correcting the result effectively giving useful data to improve data collection and detection methods.

Lemmy clients should really include an option to group or only show the first instance of a link for cases like this; where the same link is posted to multiple places.

User Agent Switcher and Manager