am I the only one who would advocate for text only storage: no. This comment also gets my point? There should be text only lemmy instances which only save text and do not allow any kind of image posting or storage.

• text is less offensive to consume and moderate than evil images or video
• text is way more information dense and can be even compressed more! Truly the green biosphere friendly data format. I would be willing to save text only data of strangers on my hard-drive, but not images or video. Could even be valuable llm analysis training data.

Yes people could post base64 encoded images, but that is a larger technical barrier and can be detected. If image storage is really need, images should be heavily compressed (webp 90% quality loss), provided as links to external sites, and whenever possible svg / vector graphics should be preferred.