it varies by activitypub implementation. mastodon for example caches media per instance, pleroma simply hotlinks. briefly searching through github issues, i be

it varies by activitypub implementation. mastodon for example caches media per instance, pleroma simply hotlinks. briefly searching through github issues, i believe pixelfed does not cache remote media. discussion on this issue about remote media cacheing seems to indicate that pixelfed only caches avatars https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/4571 https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/issues/4571