Been considering to self-host, Imgur clearly no longer wants to be in the image hosting business and wants to focus on their "community" instead
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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do they have a sizable community? honestly i just assumed it was almost exclusively used for image hosting.
It's home to a very strange community unaware that their "platform" was just an image host for users of an actual social media platform. Well, at least it was before imgur recently started adding social media features and purged nsfw content.
Popular image posts from reddit would routinely get boosted (sans context) to the top of imgur's homepage, which would attract confused, angry, and often unintentionally hilarious comments from imgur users. Iirc there was a subreddit dedicated to this phenomenon.
Edit: sp
adding social media features and purged nsfw content
I mean, those are both pretty much the same thing these days.
If you want something very cheap (though not necessarily totally free), and within your control, just get an AWS S3 bucket and put them there. Or possibly Backblaze.
Yep, I'm gradually shifting to S3 for my public direct file sharing as a bit of an exercise in learning AWS. It's not free, but 99.99% of the time it's remarkably cheap. If you're willing to put up with learning AWS (or any other general-purpose platform really, cloud or self-hosted,) there's a nice feeling that comes with having more leniency to do things your way and on your terms.
Now whether it works properly, however, let alone work at all, is an entirely different story. But that's the double-edged sword with going out on your own: it's more likely to be your fault, not someone else's.
id be pretty psyched if my video embedding starts working one of these days 👨💻
I've not looked into it fully but there is that pixelfed which is a part of the fediverse, don't know how it works for public images and whatnot though since it touts itself as a secure platform where you can choose who can see your stuff kind of deal
I use vgy.me, it doesn't support video uploads but it does have markdown in the image page
edit: switched to catbox because i learned that vgy autoremoves after a year
I have been using lensdump
You can upload an image when creating a post by clicking on the small thumbnail icon at the bottom right of the file input
Some instances/servers are currently not capable of uploads larger than ~100kb, so a good image CDN is desired.
I also feel like lots of people uploading images directly to an instance's servers put a lot more strain on them - especially at a time where most servers are experiencing serious growing pains and may not really have the funds to keep expanding their storage. They're not ad supported like places like Reddit are.
I think it would be courteous of us to try and spread it out a bit and use services specifically intended for and set up for image hosting.
you can also copy and image and paste it straight into the text box, it will upload and embed the image:
This is straight from greenshot.
pixelfed might work for you.
As someone who doesn't know, what's wrong with imgur?
Edit: Thanks for the info guys.
Imgur announced recently they are going to be purging images that haven't been viewed for x amount of time.
If you’re just shitposting dank memes, having the pictures deleted after a while shouldn’t be a big problem. If you’re posting something a bit more valuable, consider keeping the pictures on flickr or even pixelfed.
Is pixelfed really a good way to prevent dead links? I don't know much about it other than that it's part of the fediverse, so I'd assume any pictures hosted there last only as long as the instance they're posted to.
If you choose to use Pixelfed, you should probably be active in your chosen instance and donate regularly.
I suppose you're right, though that's quite involved when all I want is to host an image.
I had heard about them deleting images uploaded without an account, and the nsfw purge stuff, but I hadn't heard about this. Thank you so much! I'll have to make extra sure that everything I've uploaded on my account over the years is for sure backed up elsewhere.
Do you know if this is already happening, or is there a date in the future that it'll start? Most of my uploads are private and I'm too busy to get all of it manually downloaded right this moment (if it's even still there!) Crud! I only just finally managed to download aaallll my years of stuff from Photobucket after they stopped allowing free hosting, lol.
Thanks for the info, I really appreciate it!
They also banned porn. You know, most of the traffic.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, as long as you aren't using it for archival purposes. I would prefer not everything I post live forever.
While I'd agree for identifying pictures, image hosting that suddenly doesn't one day becomes a huge problem for a lot of old tutorial-based content. Look at any old car forum for examples.
For that kind of thing, I'd say host the images with the rest of the content.
They just stopped hosting porn. Dont know why OP is asking but quite a few people were scrambling for a replacement a couple of weeks ago on reddit.
Postimg.cc
If you are willing to selfhost: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer---single-click--drag-n-drop-upload
https://vgy.me/ has been pretty reliable for me
They delete your photos if they're unaccessed by the uploader after a year unfortunately. Ask me how I found out :(
Oh
IPFS
I found this because I was testing out nostr and suddenly had loli.net in the firewall logs (apparently a content delivery network): https://sm.ms/
I like it because it gives you markdown you can paste into lemmy :D
I'm not sure about the longevity but a lot of people use discord as CDN apparently. There's even an API for that.
We should really try to stick to federated FOSS choices, so that we don't have a future nightmare on our hands.
What's there to federate about image cdn? If you don't want to use 3rd party service just self host. You just have to make compromises either way.
We actually feature a federated image hosting service on lemmy, there isn't much to image hosting to federate, you're right, but we shouldn't rely on imgur or discord or anything centralized wherever possible to avoid centralization of control over our media.
What's really the difference between a federated Lemmy instance for hosting vs a 3rd party anyways?
If another Lemmy instance goes down, all the content on it is gone anyways. Federated != Mirrored. Just because you can browse the content doesn't mean it's safe from going away at the whims of one person
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