imgur has more recently blocked access from numerous VPS, VPN and Tor.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Wait, why? What's the incentive?
Collect more user data and sell it for $$$ probably.
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.
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
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.
Ah, that would explain why I kept getting errors viewing images on Reddit with Safari on Mac (which uses a VPN-like privacy system
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!
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.
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.
I'm usually on kbin, and here, imgur links are broken. Embeds and thumbnails, neither works for any imgur link.
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.
Fuck imgur for blocking Mullvad
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.
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I remember when imgur used to be good.
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?
use a web browser....even on your phone....
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.
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?
Thers's plenty of other good reasons not to use non-free closed source "SaaS" like reddit.
then again, if your phone has "safari browser" you probably are unable to be reasoned with anyway.
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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+.
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.
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.
When posting one image, sure.
But (at least on kbin currently) there’s no way to upload a gallery or several pictures to put into the body of a thread.
Also webm doesn't work on lemmy or rather pict.rs
Plenty of larger instances limit the upload size because it can snowball into huge hosting costs rather quickly.
I've had the chance to join several big servers and even manage my own (calckey.social). Usually, they set an upload size limit of around 10-15MB, which is more than sufficient for most photos.
However, I must say that I'm not a big fan of Imgur. It's not the best experience for visitors and feels like a prime example of something being unnecessarily unpleasant. I believe people mainly use Imgur out of habit, and the drawbacks haven't been significant enough to overcome that familiarity just yet.
yup, I've seen Beehaw admins asking people to use external image hosting sites in order to reduce the server load before.
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?
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.
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
Not strictly true. Mastodon, pixelfed, KBin all cache images.
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.
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.
@atomicpoet Are there implications for who gets to pay for the disk space it takes to store image files?
As someone who manages multiple Fediverse servers, I wanted to share a friendly perspective on image uploads. If the option to upload images is available on a server, it's likely because the administrator wants you to utilize that feature. Otherwise, they would simply disable it to avoid incurring additional costs for hosting image files. So go ahead and feel free to make use of image uploads when they're available!
lemm.ee has uploads limited to like 100kb so people can use avatars but effectively the admin wants 0 image hosting. Idk what to use outside of imgur, was hoping this thread would have alternates but I don't see anything outside of pixelfed, which doesn't support anonymous easy upload.
I use https://postimages.org/
It is very reliable and supports uploading images upto 24 mb in size and 10k x 10k pixels.
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I could see bandwidth being a big issue if the community grows as well, considering images aren't cached on your local instance so that could easily take down a smaller server or cause a huge unexpected spike in costs.
I feel like we need a good third option, but I'm not even sure what that would look like. Maybe something distributed like IPFS.
On Mastodon, like kbin and lemmy, locally posted images are hosted locally, and remotely hosted images are cached locally. This can cause a lot of storage. But you can run an automated cron that will clear out cached images older than whatever you want, like a month. Then the local cached storage is at a minimum, and if someone wants to view the image again, it'll get fetched. I don't know if kbin and lemmy have this feature, but they should. It's probably not the locally uploaded images that'll take up a ton of space, it's caching all the remote ones that will.
Note that not all instances do this. Especially not necessarily if they aren't mastodon. My calckey instance for example has it optional and i have it off there. Akkoma i know also can do it optionally.
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