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 💙
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-rswill 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.