Its centralized by design, its to protect IP's of the the visitors.
In snort you can configure your own imgproxy but i doubt anybody sets it
Discussion
You can still use the proxy to hide IP. My point is strict with image size.
I cannot use Snort without its proxy. It gets too heavy to render for my user.
Hmm i never had much problem with it off, but it general size is a problem
At least on snort users are forced to upload their avatars to void.cat which compresses them to webp
Ive seen many GIF avatars in the 10s of MB's and this can be compressed into hundreds of KB
There is a good amount of +20MB profile pictures and banners. It's not only gifs. Many times they are there just because the user never thought about the size.
I guess the simple thing to do is to actually use the imgproxy to convert the file for you then upload that instead, but you have a problem with resolutions
In terms of protecting IP address of user downloading images. Can use COIL-compose and configure the ImageLoader to use a separate OkHttp client (which can be instantiated with Tor SOCKS5 proxy).
In terms of reducing mobile data, I think COIL resizes it on the fly based on the composable view size that it'll be loaded into. Still might be downloading the entire size though. IMO, imgproxy would be the best way to go.
Wish I could run it in a FreeBSD Jail 😢, otherwise I would totally host my own.