for the longest time a lot of images posted to reddit were really posted on imgur (until they started hosting it on their own, too). is there a fediverse'd imgur we should be using to complement lemmy? its docs say it shouldn't be used for large images and videos.
pixelfed seems more like a federated flickr or instagram, not just simple image/album hosting like imgur. thoughts? ty ๐
Well, an imgur alternative does not need to be federated, if it's to be used to only host large content. Imgur does not have any real social features, as far as I understand, either.
So any simple image/video hosting tool should do. I mean, you could also just use imgur!
Imgur does have comments and votes. They tried to make it an actual community... It didn't work, for the most part.
There was (is?) a subreddit about random imgur comments who didn't understand that people used it just as a hosting website to share images with other communities, notably reddit. I think it was lost on imgur or something? Haven't been there in a while and can't find it. I can find "Ignorant imgur" but it's so inactive, I don't think that is it.
fair! even imgur has made some big changes like a new rule against nsfw. it makes me think the same garbage that happened with twitter and reddit could happen to imgur
imo that's not good enough anymore for the web at its current age. decentralization works and is the way to go. communities shouldn't suffer from the gross actions of large companies. that's why a federated and decentralized imgur clone would be good, too :)
Imgur was created as an image host for Reddit back when Reddit did not support direct image uploads, so any self-hostable image storage solution including Lemmy's built-in pict-rs will work. Federation of the file host is not necessary as there is no need to mirror the files between instances, they are linked to federated posts and the file can be viewed directly on the uploader's instance. As for the community features of Imgur, the "community" on Imgur is, as one Redditor put it, "the sewer rats who don't realize they're living in the sewer".
Indie and self-hosted object storage providers could help diversify who is storing the end data (ideally less Amazon and big corps). I've heard things about https://min.io but haven't dug into it beyond that. And pict-rs instances using filesystem/sled are already set, although cost for disk is more expensive than objects I think?
Yes, by default files are stored directly on a volume on the disk but it's possible to configure pict-rs to use object storage, although there isn't much documentation for configuring and using it with Lemmy yet. Kbin has support for S3 storage in its environment variables. I'll do some research and see if I can add it to Lemmy.