

I figured a post with a link with preview image wouldn’t be the same in terms of event as an image post. Turns out it pretty much is, but also, I checked a few posts and cross-posts across instances, all of them have an image url of the original instance, not the one I’m viewing on. So if they are individually fetching this image, they’re not using it.
Edit: I was wrong, two of the crossposts just didn’t respond to the request for activity, so I was looking at the wrong response data


Okay, what you explained does make sense, but not in the context of a federation event (as far as I understand, which could very well be wrong).
Sure, but this would only be needed if a user needs permission or something to view a post. They don’t, a post is (always, afaik?) public.
Besides, federation is not on a user level, but on an instance level. It doesn’t matter if user A has blocked user B. As long as just one person on user A’s instance does not have user B blocked, events and metadata will need to be federated. So, for public federated services, I don’t think it makes any sense to use this kind of access control.