The way I see it the only reason why you'd rate limit a media proxy is so people are forced to pull the media directly from your server, exposing their own IPs. I consider this to be concerning at best, malicious at worst.
Discussion
not true. you aren't a large instance so it doesn't make sense to you but poast/baest have a handful of people who all they do is use our mediaproxy to scrape other instances porn bots. that actually made up almost 50% of our database usage in sept 2022. one guy on the page down button. never underestimate coomers