It actually doesnt work that way. All images are attempted to be stored locally by the program lemmy uses (pict.rs) so this makes storage grow very fast. Solution is to offload them to object storage as TheDude has done. This means a dollar or two a month from some users will be able to cover costs as things grow assuming as the site gets bigger some % of people give a few dollars here and there.

Just old images. New ones seem working?