I was looking for how to speed up nos.social with loading images and I thought about proxying the images, so they're smaller and served through a CDN... turns out that Iris already does that!
Using https://imgproxy.iris.to/ and the https://github.com/imgproxy/imgproxy tool.
I didn't see a discussion about it, but i think it's interesting. On one level, it's a privacy issue, you take requests which were being logged at what ever url they find in a nostr post, which leaks a bunch of info... and puts it in a proxy. So it protects privacy but also shifts where your ip address is logged to iris's relay. This actually feels like it is a step forward for privacy, but it is a tradeoff. Getting smaller images served faster is the primary benefit. If nostr is going to compete with centralized apps it needs to feel snappy. CDN's help a lot with that.
Scuttlebutt directly shares media from peers, and it's very slow, often the no peer with the media you want is online when you're viewing it. Many apps, including planetary, don't do a good job at downscaling the images for resolutions needed to view in an app, so the files are bigger than they need to be as well.
https://nostr.build/i/nostr.build_95bb7ab1602652b152795511012747fafcbc040bf0adac220cd833cc5a0ff817.jpeg" class="embedded-image" loading="lazy">
