It’s easiest to just register a domain name and use Couldflare Tunnels. No need to worry about dynamic DNS, port forwarding etc. Plus, you have the security advantages of DDoS protection and firewall (WAF). Finally, you get portability - you can change your ISP, router or even move your entire lab into the cloud if you wanted to, and you won’t need to change a single thing.

I have a lab set up on my mini PC that I often take to work with me, and it works the same regardless of whether it’s going thru my work’s restricted proxy or the NAT at home. Zero config required on the network side.

This shouldn’t even be a question lol. Even if you aren’t worried about theft, encryption has a nice bonus: you don’t have to worry about secure erasing your drives when you want to get rid of them. I mean, sure it’s not that big of a deal to wipe a drive, but sometimes you’re unable to do so - for instance, the drive could fail and you may not be able to do the wipe. So you end up getting rid of the drive as-is, but an opportunist could get a hold of that drive and attempt to repair it and recover your data. Or maybe the drive fails, but it’s still under warranty and you want to RMA it - with encryption on, you don’t have to worry about some random accessing your data.

And refactor the code a bit to be on the safe side - change the name of the project and remove any references to litigious companies. And use an anonymous handle + VPN/proxy chains so they can’t sue you.

Honestly it boggles my mind that devs contribute to emulators like these using identifiable names and traceable IPs, when everyone knows how these greedy corporations operate. Did no one learn anything from the Sony vs Geohotz case, or all the subsequent takedown against emulators? Why do these devs keep falling into the same trap again and again?

Desktop users exist

So do Desktop tools like Flameshot, which can directly upload to image hosts and copy the URL to the clipboard which makes it easy to share images, and there also exists third-party Desktop web-clients such as Photon, which could be updated with that functionality as well. But with Lemmy itself being open source, it wouldn’t take much effort to modify the code to use a third-party image host.

have a history of deciding to forbid hotlinking

There are plenty of hosts which do allow hotlinking though, like imgbb.com

history of suddenly deleting all (e.g. PhotoBucket) or some (e.g. Imgur) images .

Not a big loss, IMO. Lemmy isn’t an image hosting nor an image-centric site, it’s a text-heavy forum at first instance, and anyone posting images are encouraged to provide text alts for the benefit of blind users, so images not persisting isn’t a big deal.

If image persistence is really that important, there are other services which are better suited for that, such as Pixelfed. But in the first place, I wouldn’t rely on some random Lemmy server, which is vulnerable to DDoS and other attacks and could go down at any time (also why the importance on decentralization - no single instance is infallible). I mean, when there’s no guarantee that a Lemmy instance will even be there tomorrow, is there really a need to worry about image persistence?

This can be easily implemented client-side, like how third-party Reddit clients have been doing for years, by uploading to the likes of Imgur. Shift the responsibility away from the Lemmy server and onto dedicated image hosts, who have the storage to spare, plus manpower/policies to deal with illegal content.

Or just disable image uploads completely. We got by on Reddit without any built-in image hosting functionality for over a decade, so Lemmy should be fine without it as well - especially considering that we don’t really have many image-heavy communities, besides the NSFW instances. I mean, storage costs money you know, and with Lemmy being run by volunteers, it makes even more sense to get rid of image hosting to save costs.