Wow, thanks for the full transparency. You are awesome!

My opinion would be option 2 (proxy requests) , but with a higher cache TTL or simple a LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache.

If you’re getting throttled, it could be mitigated by increasing the cache retention period (or improving the cache hits).

Another improvement : Would it be possible to change the proxy, so that if the proxied requests are throttled, it simply sends the user a http-302 to the origin (instead of a broken image)?

Regarding option 1 (full cache) : I greatly appreciate your desire to hide/protect your users ip, but it is outside the scope of what I expect from a Lemmy server. Maybe you could market and upsell this increased privacy as a subscription based feature. However, if I want privacy - I’ll use a VPN.

Regarding option 3 (User fetches content from origin) : From a users perspective, I really don’t want my Lemmy experience to be based on hitting a bunch of (potentially) unreliable services. When I, as a lemm.ee User, request a post from Lemmy.world (for example), lemm.ee will proxy and cache that post and the comments. This is the distributed nature of Lemmy (as far as I understand). Why restrict this caching to just posts/threads/comments and not include images (which, let’s face it, are as meaningful as pure text - especially wrt memes).