The front page of the image hosting website is full of John Oliver giving the owner the middle finger.
Archived version: https://archive.is/20250828134656/https://www.404media.co/imgurs-community-is-in-full-revolt-against-its-owner/
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I’m always surprised when I see an imgr link. Especially on reddit. Like, why can’t you just use the built in img upload function?
Back in the day, reddit didn’t host images.
Haven’t used imgur in ages. It doesn’t work always says over capacity.
Yep, its VPN. The other thing that breaks imgur are some of privacy/spoof/security settings in Firefox. That said, I am in the same boat…been a while since I have used it to scroll
That’s them filtering VPN ips. If you try jumping to a lesser used server, you’ll probably see the site working.
Recently, most internet sites and especially those relying in cloudflare are filtering VPNs, and often blacklisting IPs just because it hurts their bottom-line.
Use Rimgo! It’s a frontend for Imgur. Like Redlib for Reddit, Invidious for Youtube, etc.
The most effective protests against your capitalist overlords are to strike or boycott.
Everything else is just begging.
Ehh… There are more extreme things, but then that starts being something other than “protest”.
At least these people are wasting imgur resources and removing value by cluttering up the site. If they’d keep it up and actually battle the shitlords, it’d be better than a bitchboi boycott.
Same. Imgur had a bad reputation for years but I didn’t know why. 404 explains that it has the same fate as reddit. Nothing will change then. Users will complain a lot but not move to another site.
To keep with the reddit comparison, there were a lot of bad events that should have triggered a massive migration, but it didn’t happen. People stayed on reddit and they still complain without doing anything about it.
But imagine having to choose a server from which to access the fediverse! This is just too complicated!
Tbf that’s a big deal for Mastodon aka Fediverse, not so much on the Threadiverse with K/Mbin, Lemmy, or PieFed.
And the tools that exist to help are laughably bad - the last time I tried the auto-selector website it chose for me hexbear.net, and I noticed Lemmy.ml was prominently displayed up high in their listing (surely the Windows-using centrists and conservatives on Reddit will have no problems joining that extremist leftist instance of FOSS enthusiasts… r-r-right?!).
I had to make the life-threatening choice between Gmail, Hotmail, and Proton for my email. I almost died!
I don’t think the “choosing a server” thing has been a serious roadblock for years, if it ever was. Most people just pick The Big One anyway. If they knew enough to care about distributing users properly among instances, they probably wouldn’t be intimidated by picking
Yeah, none of this hurts their bottom line. Calling it a “revolt” is absurd.
I’m sure this will work this time, unlike when likely the same people did the same thing with reddit lol.
The equity firms that own places like this with tens of millions of users or more know that they will ultimately win simply because of inertia and momentum. It’s fucked because they’re preying on people’s sense of community and shit but that’s the world we live in now, you have to be ready to bail in the places you hang out online at a moments notice because at any moment some rich dick could be like “hmm, this could be a good performer in my portfolio, let’s get some intrusive advertising on there and cut services drastically”
The reality is that the bigger a website/service gets, the more money it costs to run. Something like imgur especially would cost absurd amounts of money to run. If it can’t be monetised then it will die. The same thing will happen to any competitors that pop up claiming to be better - it’s just the nature of business. Hosting and bandwidth and hardware and employees aren’t free.
If it can’t be monetised then it will die.
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Seems like it did okay for many years before selling to private equity that absolutely destroyed the site and filled it with obtrusive advertising
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There’s probably a middle ground between a project like lemmy (for example) and whatever imgur has become
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Wait imgur was its own social media thing? I never knew lol.
There’s do many image hosters out there.
I just found out my boss would scroll imgur directly. I only ever knew it as the image host of choice on reddit. Very rarely I’d click thru an imgur link to an album and then stay on the site to scroll a few more images, but that’s it.
Oh, they have their own memes, comics, famous users/posters, copypasta, etc, except it feels more like your stuck on r/all with a smaller userbase. Comments are, I believe still locked at 140 characters, so conversation is severely limited. It was fun - I was an Imgur user for several years before I realized that Reddit was really everything I wanted from Imgur. Literally haven’t gone back since I switched to Reddit about 10 years ago
The term “social media site” is used very loosely these days. Allow comments on anything? Congrats, you’re a social media site!
It even was imho pretty entertaining for a long time, up to about season 1 of don john.
Yeah, I only found out maybe last year that there’s a whole community underneath it. Up until then I thought it was simply just an image hosting site.
Was hoping to find a few good alternatives in this commentsland
https://www.imgcat.io/ is being built by an imgur user but it’s not ready yet.
I’ve not heard of this, but I like it a lot–merci!
Rimgo, if you use something like LibRedirect then you probably use it already.
I’ve had issues with rimgo/libredirect before, is there a good faq or resource that will help me learn how to use it more effectively? (I know it was user-error cuz I’m pretty stupid)
Without knowing specifically what issue you ran into, it might not be user error. A lot of public instances for privacy frontends wind up going down for all sorts of reasons (server overload/scraped to death by bots, had to end server due to costs, API changes to the underlying service breaking something, just to name a few.) Part of the reason I started looking into self-hosting stuff was just to prop up some privacy frontends for my own use.
Wow, that point about the public instances was quite unknown to me at the time and explains a lot of my initial frustrations for sure. I’ve been looking into getting started self-hosting but am unsure what kinds of important but also safe tools I should start with as a newbie. I need a guide or ranking resource of some sort. Maybe I just lurk c/self-host bunches for now tho
I have great admiration for those that maintain public instances, but it sounds like I need to again try to get the self-hosting ball rolling if I aim to truly further the privacy-preserving cause
Honestly I think it’s a great way to get into self-hosting without having to worry too much! I don’t have any one specific guide to point you towards. I just got started a few weeks ago myself, and mostly brushed off some old skills I’d known from other projects and doing a LOT of searching of videos and posts and articles and just figuring things out as I went. So the best I can do is tell you some topics you’re going to want to learn about.
Assuming you’ll want to start small and easy (not needing to expose anything to the internet, just local area network stuff), I recommend you search up the following topics:
- Linux commands (if you don’t know them already)
- Running a virtual machine (if you don’t have some hardware lying around that you can use to run as your ‘server.’ Old laptops are a fantastic starting point if you do. But if not you can definitely experiment with a VM on your PC!)
- Docker & Docker Compose (in that order if you don’t find some two-in-one resource)
That should give you enough to start toying around and trying things out. And once you start doing that, you start unearthing what you don’t know and that’ll point you towards the next thing you need to learn. :)
The point of good old Imgur was just to upload an image and have it hosted on a URL. Free hosting options now include Catbox and Github.
As for the social media aspect? Idk why you’d want to replicate that format of social media.
The comment sections on meme dumps are usually pretty fun. A lot of people have the perfect reaction gif for any situation
I know a bunch of Imurgians have gone over to https://discuit.org/
Edit: there’s also https://cdn.imgpile.com/ which is more like how imgur is set up.
What’s discuit like? I have heard of it but what’s the allure besides it’s not one of the big platforms?
It’s more similar to old reddit than how imgur is set up, but it’s more community driven, and everyone is very friendly and quite helpful in my experience so far. I can’t say much beyond that as I’m still learning more about it myself.
For something more like how imgur is, there’s also https://cdn.imgpile.com/ which feels a little rough around the edges, but has potential.
I edited my other comment to include a site more like imgur, https://cdn.imgpile.com/
Nice, much appreciated
I’m trying out a few, though I’ll have more time to explore them and figure out what I like and don’t like over the weekend.
I’ve signed up for discuit, and am looking back at tumblr, which I’d left for a while but still has good community.
I’ve signed up for imgpile, but there’s some problem with the confirmation; I don’t know if that’s on me or them. And I’ve joined the waiting list for imgcat. I looked at imgchest. but there’s too many ads and some AI stuff, so I’m skipping that for now.
I’ve added in a couple discord channels (Ellie and BSV); even if I don’t think discord is a good replacement for imgur, it’ll let me follow things for a while.
I’m not sure what to do with with two cat accounts I followed on imgur (KittensForDays and SigridRides); both post on YouTube went other social media, but I didn’t use yt much, nor other social media, so …
Might be worth checking out WAFRN if you want something tumblr-like!
Very cool. I’d love to hear your experience/criticisms if possible
