Basically the title. People are currently upset with Imgur for layoffs or something and instead of doing the sensible thing of stopping it’s use, they’re flooding it. Seems like a good opportunity to shill an european alternative if it exists.

  • it_depends_man@lemmy.worldEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    Call me ignorant, but I never understood how hosting images is profitable. At all. Even if you can pull of the technological part of it.

    And if the key is ads, it’s the same problem all over again, because the profitable ad managers are US companies too.

    And otherwise, just use the fediverse? Any image you upload here, you can link to anywhere and it serves the same purpose?

    • katinka@sh.itjust.worksOPEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      I use random little sites as needed but I have no idea where they’re hosted. I’m talking about easily usable alternative for the general public.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      4·
      2 months ago

      The policy is going to be instance dependent, but in the beginning there was a lot of hesitation on image storage on a server vs. a link to a dedicated image storage. Maybe things are better now with both space and federation and it’s not as big of a problem? Hell, that’s why Imgur was born, to take the pressure off of the Reddit servers.

    • GenosseFlosse@feddit.orgEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Imgur is not just hosting the image, but also building a feed from all the images it has, and then they can insert ads into the feed. They get traffic from search engines, reddit and their app.

    • birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      If images automatically get deleted after a certain amount of time, I could see it costing less to host, but that’s just my gut feel. Not necessarily reliable, I think.

      Letting the API be used by companies at a fee is also a possibility. Selling merch is also a thing. Affilate sales is yet another.

      Then there’s subscription services. If the site runs really smoothly, is intuitive to use, and cancelling easy, I could see that also being useful.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      4·
      2 months ago

      Sounds like how the Fediverse was when Reddit blew up the first time. Amazing how sudden demand sparks development.

  • Jay@lemmy.caEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    I’ve seen mention of https://cdn.imgpile.com/ on imgur but it’s… uh… a work in progress to say the least. Although I’m not sure if they’re European or not.