As someone who doesn't know, what's wrong with imgur?
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Imgur announced recently they are going to be purging images that haven't been viewed for x amount of time.
Haven't they always, though? Pretty sure since the beginning it purged anything that hasn't been viewed for something like 6 months or so. That's why you got a lot of dead links in old Reddit (or others) posts
I don't think so, I've never had this happen in the few cases where I revisited an imgur url after years of not visiting it
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.
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.
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
First thing I thought of as well. I like that they allow image expiration and not just forever.
You can upload an image when creating a post by clicking on the small thumbnail icon at the bottom right of the file input
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.
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.
pixelfed might work for you.
Looks interesting and I will def be joining, but it does seem more instagramy than specifically free image hosting.
Yeah, but you can ignore that and hotlink the images, I believe.
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
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.
If you are willing to selfhost: https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted#file-transfer---single-click--drag-n-drop-upload
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 👨💻
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 :(
IPFS
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'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
That's very true, but i'm opposed to giving discord and imgur even more power over the media posted to it.
Again, image hosting is a very minimally federated thing, and it's one of the areas where it makes the least difference, but regardless, we should strive to avoid centralization wherever possible.
Also, I think it's possible to create a federated automatically mirrored alternative, I wonder if there's potential there, I don't know!
anonfiles.com
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 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've been using my Onedrive storage that comes with my Office subscription. It's not ideal but at least I have some control over how longer the link is available.
Since you're asking for an imgur alternative, I assume that you're looking for something free. My suggestion might not be what you're looking for.