Lemmy is cool. I’ve been using it on and off since reddit started making their API changes.
X, formerly known as Twitter, is one of the largest social media platforms. To not report on a change like this that injects ads that you’d see on “news” websites with clickbaity articles would be silly.
That would be great. I am not sure if it was RES doing it or it was a default reddit thing but I do remember images automatically expanding on there. Having it happen automatically on Lemmy would be great as long as the user is not on a slow or data-capped connection.
Currently on reddit if you attempt to link to a image directly outside of reddit and somebody clicks it, it’ll redirect them to a media viewer page that hides all the comments but provides a link to view them. As much as I hate that redirect, I don’t think it is a terrible idea for Lemmy to do as well because of the issue your friend had with the thumbnail that you wanted them to click.
Just an FYI but if you posted anything prior to March 2023, the Pushshift project archived it. Even if you requested Reddit itself to remove all of your data, everything will exist in that archive forever.