There was some change that happened a few hours ago. I saw two old communities that I had deleted pop up in my moderated communities list on the Alexandrite side bar. Shortly after I saw that, stuff stopped loading. I logged into my firewall to see of LW had changed CDN, image host, or what was being blocked, but nothing stood out. However there are a lot more connections.

In the past, the Lemmy posts feed is usually a cached image and article. There have always been some posts that would not load images for me and were blocked by my whitelist firewall, but they were around 10% or less of all posts about news articles. This recent change has knocked out 90%+ of all images. It only looks like stuff uploaded to other instances or images loaded to things I have white listed specifically are showing. Scrolling Lemmy has become visiting every post link image URL. That means getting fingerprinted by every one of these links simply because of scrolling the feed.

This is what my block list looks like after the first ~50 articles:

…I can’t upload images now either. I only see a block for “static.cloudflareinsights.com” and for “cloudflare-ech.com”.

The first of those I don’t know what it is used for and I never allow such an address that could be used in general by any website. The second is a system I fundamentally disagree with as it has no accountability and anonymizes corporate stalking, data theft, and is a breach of autonomy as far as I understand it.