Imgur now blocks several VPNs and have issues loading embedded previews in several fediverse platforms. So instead of using imgur, you could use one of the following alternatives for uploading your images.
https://postimages.org/
https://imgbox.com/
https://imgbb.com/
https://www.imagebam.com/
Can somebody explain on the purpose of these sites?
The whole time when I was using reddit I would just upload from my gallery to the app, never had to use an image uploader website, it sounds like a pain to use.
That’s because you arrived when reddit already had its image hosting.
Before you could only upload a link, so you had to find a hosting site.
It’d be the same if lemmy didn’t have one.
And in fact it’s like that for me, I didn’t configured pict-rs, so I can’t upload images to my lemmy instance, I need to configure it or use a hosting site.
Wow image-hosting is a thing. Why don’t they just have something so essential out of the box, is it expensive or something
It requires a lot of storage space. Much more than for just text.
Also, additional liability for hosting images uploaded by literally anyone, that could depict abuse, or be copyrighted.
Ahh so if somebody did that, the blame would fall on the site that has the image posted
You need a place to store the files. Pictures are just a type of file.
Short answer is yes. Long answer is that with text it’s much easier to stamp out illegal activity because keyword searches are cheap while semantic searches in images are pretty good but extremely computationally expensive. You can’t just scan for illegal activity in images the same way you can nigh instantly scan a body of text for “illegal-site.com”.
That makes a certain kind of sense but does that mean the filtering algorithm Facebook uses that targets NSFW photos in posts and group chats is very complicated and expensive? is it important for a site like reddit or Lemmy to scan for illegal activities oj a photo?
Using them do add one or two extra steps before posting. Images can hog up server resources and using these third-party sites reduces the burden for the server of your instance which is run by volunteers/hobbyists with money often coming from their own pockets. Its just a nice thing to voluntarily do.
On the other hand, it’s great that some instances have file size limits. It forces users to look at these image hosts instead of them just recklessly uploading images into the servers as if Lemmy is housed in a Palo Alto facility.