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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
It will happen to any social media company looking for investors.
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.
Honestly, something IPFS-based would probably be a reasonable answer, but I don't think anyone's made a generic image hosting system on it yet.
agree, my first thought was ipfs. would be cool if ipfs gave the uploader the power to delete/revoke
The design of IPFS - using content-based addressing with append-only interactions - makes deleting/revoking basically impossible to implement, let alone guarantee.
There's the dat protocol (now hypercore by holepunch) that handled this better, with content being addressed by key instead, so that the owner of the private part of the key could modify content after "uploading" it.
Unfortunately, hypercore still hasn't really reached that stable point where you'd like it to be for developing a software like this on top of it.
you're absolutely right about ipfs. its mission of forever preserving the web is awesome but it means that data will last indefinitely (and every version of every piece of data lol)
i had never heard of hypercore. that's pretty cool. maybe lemmy will get some nice fixes for storage, image, video management to make instance media hosting easy for the instance maintainers so they can follow the same path reddit did of hosting post media. that way, media not only stays with the instance but can be edited/deleted by the users
Have a Look at PixelFed, not being an Imgur user I cant tell if it will meet all your requirements but it's definitely a great way to work with images in the fediverse
pixelfed looks like it is catered towards creative artists who make images. they deserve their own tool/space, of course, and imgur was never really catered to anything except whatever images and gifs you can throw at it
I think some sort of p2p solution would be really cool. You could basically allocate a certain amount of storage on your server and images would be stored and grabbed by peers as needed. Something like BitTorrent where multiple peers have the same content to reduce load. Not sure if it already exists or is even practically possible.
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someone beat me to it but yeah, i think something like ipfs is trying to be the sort of p2p decentralized storage solution. i like your thinking of bittorrent :D
There's @pinetta@fedi.software - a Fediverse alternative to Pinterest - if it interests you :)