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 🙂

    • atomicpoet@kbin.socialOP
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      1 year ago

      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!

    • Gnothi@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • JoeCoT@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • OctoFloofy@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          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.