It was disappointing to go through the saga of thinking I found a semi reliable podcast regarding health and current research, to finding some weak episodes, and finally arriving at the conclusion that his methodology is sloppy at best. The Dr Lustig episode was especially egregious. He let that guy make some of the most outlandish claims that I’ve heard. He made up statements about how FDA nutrition labels are required which was easily dismissible by a quick look at the FDA website. That was more or less the final nail in the coffin for me.
The biggest indicator to the scientific weakness of his podcast is the rate of release. It is not possible to do weekly releases on the complex topics he covers AND maintain the level of scientific scrutiny required to vet the referenced research or guest.
Option 3 is the only one that seems sustainable long term. Donations will NEVER keep up with user growth, thus storage costs will balloon out of control.
Completely avoiding any chance of illegal content touching the servers should immediately have everyone agreeing on this option. I doubt anyone here is willing to foot legal bills and as such even minor legal actions would be the end of this instance.
Privacy is nice but ip logging is the simplest form to “protect” against with even a free VPN. If those claiming privacy concerns here aren’t already using a VPN and are depending purely on lemme.ee’s proxy then their internet hygiene needs an update.
As for usability, the image being deleted from external provider presents the same issue to the user between option 2 and 3. The cache from option 2 will inventually get cleared and it’ll fail to pull a fresh copy if deleted from the external hosts.