No, it's not necessary if you're the artist, although feel welcome to link to your gallery if you want anyways.
That is a beautiful picture, but there's a hint of sadness, right? Is there a background to the story?
As a non US person, it's baffling to me that there's this whole background of being "the land of the free", but half the country would want to turn it into Saudi Arabia 2.0, Christian Boogaloo.
That said, anyone of you over there who are opposing these changes, keep up the fight. When one country gets more conservative others will follow. There's no country in earth immune to this.
I don't necessarily agree that competing communities is something bad, especially once a "lists" and "sharing lists" feature is implemented. It's only a matter of time.
Unfortunately that's currently not possible. Technically speaking it could work like Mastodon's follower only posts with followers needing to be approved, but there's still sooo much that needs to be implemented on Lemmy, including better filters for custom feeds.
It's been flawless so far. That said, I haven't needed that much reliability, although it's worth mentioning that I haven't experienced any problem or downtime either. I've been using it at packmates.org for over 6 months now and it caches thousands of images a day.
Biggest problem I've had was documentation which was a bit sparse six months ago, although it seems to be better now.
The most important thing is that it has no egress fees.
Doesn't matter. I need to take that risk for the sake of paws!