Most Fediverse software supports image uploads, so there’s no reason to use Imgur for image hosting. Hell, even on my small single-user server (atomicpoet.org), image hosting is easy peasy. Not only is Imgur not needed, they’re an annoyance for those of us who are used to seeing images natively on the Fediverse.

I know habits are hard to break, but just remember: this isn’t Reddit 🙂

  • IntlLawGnome@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I will add that many of us who work remotely using publicly accessible wifi also use VPNs, and Imgur actively blocks IPs from multiple commercial VPN providers. If you want those users to see the image you’re sharing, Imgur is not the way to go.

    Pixelfed works well with other Fediverse services like Kbin and Lemmy. Try hosting there!

  • amio@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    I’m usually on kbin, and here, imgur links are broken. Embeds and thumbnails, neither works for any imgur link.

    • GrossGhost@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      I’ve taken to just ignoring anything with an imgur link. Hopefully with so many better alternatives imgur will die out soon on the fediverse.

        • dismalnow@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          That and to prevent megaleeching by scraping. It’s easier and cheaper to purchase curated lists of IPs than it is to bootstrap a tool to ban them based upon bandwidth.

      • Brustadnrift@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Reduce attack surface/abuse. There are plenty of services that maintains lists of “bad IPs” or “VPN IPs”. You can subscribe to them and get the list and block it. Most bots, spammers, attackers etc always run behind some type of VPN or Tor depending on what you’re doing and how much you’re trying to hide your trail.

        Most services don’t go out of their way to block VPN IPs because it’s just a support headache/nightmare. Some services like Netflix are legally obligated to block well know VPN IPs

        • Aesthesiaphilia@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          There are plenty of services that maintains lists of “bad IPs” or “VPN IPs”.

          Yeah and they’re dicks for doing so.

          VPNs are a very basic privacy tool, everyone should be using a VPN at all times.

    • HeartyBeast@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Ah, that would explain why I kept getting errors viewing images on Reddit with Safari on Mac (which uses a VPN-like privacy system

  • wutanc@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    How does images work with federation? If 1m users on a big server look at my images that I posted on a small server, is that small server hit with that traffic? Or is all servers caching the image?

    • OctoFloofy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Depend on how it’s setup. Some servers are setup to cache images, some don’t. Mine for example doesn’t and streams directly from source instead so i don’t waste storage.

    • imaBEES@kbin.social
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      IIRC all text and posts are cached on each server that is federated with one another, while images are just referenced and loaded from the server they were posted on, so if you had an image post on your server, anytime someone wants to load that image it would hit your server

  • elscallr@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Image hosting is always easy, it’s never cheap. That’s the difference between an instance with tens of thousands of users and your server with 1.

    • OctoFloofy@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Yeah even for large Media uploads I’ll probably not use my own instances server and instead use something like YouTube or streamable. Since many instances don’t even support displaying large Media at all i noticed. Like i uploaded a multiple hundreds MB video on my instance and on all Mastodon based instances it showed the file not being available.

  • Madbrad200@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You have to be careful with image hosts though. Who knows how long Lemmy images will last? at least Imgur has been around for a decade+.

    • g8phcon2@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      on a related note, hosting images on your server for users on other servers, eats up a lot of resources too. I know some instances have stopped allowing saving of images.

    • Anony Moose@lemmy.ca
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      I suppose if you wanted to be really certain your uploaded images would remain under your control, you could post them to a PixelFed instance and point it to your own domain like images.mydomain.com. That way you could always redirect them if your PixelFed instance goes down.

  • CannedTuna@sh.itjust.works
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    I use Imgur because Memmy has uploading photos direct to Imgur built in, like Apollo did. If the devs swapped to using PixelFed, I’d be using that. It’s just a matter of convenience.

    If I was uploading and sharing photos to my own account, yeah I’d use PixelFed. I don’t have an Imgur account.

    So yeah, I agree. It would be good to get away from that service.

  • ThatGirlKylie@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    What do you suggest when uploading a photo when commenting through an app? Most apps I have tried in the past including the one I’m on right now just upload to Imgur and paste a link in for you.

    What is your suggestion for mobile users then?

      • ThatGirlKylie@lemmy.world
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        No? That defeats the whole purpose of not wanting to use the browser app(s) on my phone.

        That’s like saying “just browse Reddit on your safari browser on your phone forehead and you won’t have to worry about Apollo shutting down or any other 3rd party app”

        Such short-sightedness.

        • g8phcon2@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Thers’s plenty of other good reasons not to use non-free closed source “SaaS” like reddit.

        • YMS@kbin.social
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          Not wanting to use the browser is its own purpose? Of course I understand if you want to use a specialized app that offers more features, better usability, nicer layouts than the original websites of the services they are for. But using a specialized app just because it’s not the browser (which, by the way, it often really is anyway), why that?

  • DarkThoughts@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Kbin doesn’t support pasting images from the clipboard, so it’s kind of a useless feature for me most of the time.

  • Helldiver_M@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Its been brought to my attention on a previous thread that if you’re attaching images to comments on Kbin, Lemmy users cannot see them.

    I still very much dislike imgur though, so I wouldn’t suggest that as a solution. But embedding images into hyperlinks seems to be the best way to ensure your comment containing an image is viewed correctly by the wider fediverse.

    • ferociousfloof@kbin.social
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      Yep it is super annoying atm. Getting to where Reddit + RES was for any Fediverse frontend would be my ideal, but I know that is likely a bit away yet.

      However currently Imgur links require me do multiple click/page loads to see anything with Kbin and right now that sucks because there are a fair amount of posts that link to them. And saying, well people should just use X/Y/Z to host it instead is a bad solution. The solution should always be to make X/Y/Z a better/easier hosting option while still supporting other hosts.