That’s actually not how it works. Images are hosted by the instance the community is on. Other instances embed those images as links in the page. The image is downloaded from the original instance by the browser.

Yes, it’s a known issue. The devs are absolutely slammed with optimization issues, and this will probably get addressed at some point.

Yup, but this is early days yet. As issues get filed on the github and more contributors step in to accomplish stuff, things will improve.

All the UI is doing is automatically making it a markdown link. You can do it yourself just by doing [!test_community@sopuli.xyz](https://sopuli.xyz/c/test_community)