Rendering images using unicode block symbols does not make them text, it just makes them pixelated. And you can always down sample images to reduce the bandwidt

Rendering images using unicode block symbols does not make them text, it just makes them pixelated. And you can always down sample images to reduce the bandwidth cost and still get a much better rendering than you achieve currently. For example you can convert the images to indexed 256 color compressed PNG and transmit that, which would reduce bandwidth by a factor of ~4x while still giving you much better rendering. But anyway, it was just a suggestion, it's your project, you should feel free to do what you think is best for it.