PSA: The Lemmy federation convention of hotlinking images to other peer federation servers makes it easy for a rogue instance to collect end-user IP addresses & browser strings, don't assume otherwise

If you visit a popular community like /c/memes@lemmy.ml with your web browser, the images shown are hotlinked from the Lemmy instance that the person posting the image utilized. This means that your browser makes a https request to that remote server, not your local instance, giving that server your IP address and web browser...