Plebbit is a selfhosted, opensource, nonprofit social media protocol, this project was created due to wanting to give control of communication and data back to the people.
Plebbit only hosts text. Images from google and other sites can be linked/embedded in posts. This fixes the issue of hosting any nefarious content.
ENS domain are used to name communities.
Plebbit currently offers different UIs. Old reddit and new reddit, 4chanw, andhave a Blog. Plebbit intend to have an app, internet archive, wiki and twitter and Lemmy. Choice is important. The backend/communities are shared across clients.
You wouldn't need to link base64. Base64 is just ASCII text that would go into the comment. But you can tell a browser or extension that it's an image and have it decided accordingly. You can see examples of this in the .mht files ie/Firefox makes.
if there is a character limit, you can't store too much data. You can only store a few pixels in the base64 image string
a 1 pixel base64 gif is around 70 characters