Also, is it common for a legitimate government agency to use a third-party link shortener like bitly?

I had definitely noticed things were more quiet than usual on English Lemmy, so I figured it was just the Americans being busy with that.

I do not see any documentation, but here is the pull request for the feature that was added in v0.19.4

https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4425

If the URL being posted is anything other than an image, yes. If the URL being posted is a video, an article, an MP3, whatever. If you don’t want to leave it up to Lemmy to try to grab a thumbnail do display for the post, you have the option to expicitly specify the thumbnail image to be used.

On the other hand, if the URL that you are posting is itself an image (JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, whatever), you might notice that the “Thumbnail URL” field disappears. Because Lemmy will use the image you are posting as the thumbnail.

And that password is written on a scrap of paper attached to my monitor. Perfect security.

Owned? The kid just bought stock.