I browse with images disabled. But sometimes I encounter a post where I want to see the image, like this one:

https://iejideks5zu2v3zuthaxu5zz6m5o2j7vmbd24wh6dnuiyl7c6rfkcryd.onion/@JosephMeyer@c.im/112923392848232303

When opening that link in a browser configured to fetch images, it redirects to the original instance, which is inside an access-restricted walled garden. This seems like a new behaviour for Mastodon thus may be a regression.

It’s a terrible design because it needlessly forces people on open decentralised networks into centralised walled gardens. The behaviour arises out of the incorrect assumption that everyone has equal access. As Cloudflare proves, access equality is non-existent. The perversion in this particular case is an onion is redirecting to Cloudflare (an adversary to all those who have onion access).

There should be two separate links to each post: one to the source node, and one to the mirror. This kind of automatic redirect is detrimental. Lemmy demonstrates the better approach of giving two links and not redirecting. (But Lemmy has that problem of not mirroring images).