Hexbear limits the display size to a maximum height of 400 pixels anyway (the source image is 2766 px tall), so anything larger than that just results in wasted bandwidth and longer load times. I'm actually a quality fiend, so in normal circumstances where this was being hosted on Google's servers or w/e it wouldn't matter, and it's fine to have the high quality original if someone wants to refer back to it, but it makes sense to be as gentle on Hexbear's servers as we can when creating emotes that are gonna get loaded all the time.

Ideally, Hexbear/Lemmy would automatically generate smaller images for display, but it currently doesn't do that--I discussed this in another comment.

edit: also I apologize for not just explaining this in my original comment--I didn't want to go full but in retrospect it came off as judging without giving any explanation, and thinking about the image size is not something I would expect most people to think about so I didn't at all have that intention