This is 100% correct! I'm prioritizing self-hosted OC over external linking, mainly because my priority was finding a way to reward creators.
Allowing external links would be fairly trivial, but I'd have to think through the monetization aspects of that. Not sure if I have the right model, but my hope is that since it's open source even if I go wrong someone else can find the right one.
Also thank you for the kind words about the design - it's been a fun labor of love.
Start promoting this soon, if you gain traction in the NSFW subreddits, this would blow up
High risk high reward! I do have nsfw tags and logic baked into the site, but it is risky if the site is perceived as being for nsfw content. Having it is fine, it being the main use case though means I wouldn’t be able to use Stripe as a payment provider.
A lot of Reddit (like HN) is linking to 3rd party content, and not much of it is actually user-generated OC.
Nice site though - it looks really nice.