Imgur is also banned in the uk, I think its due to cyber flashing and epilepsy trolling. Section 187, Online Safety Act.
You Should Know
YSK - for all the things that can make your life easier!
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must begin with YSK.
All posts must begin with YSK. If you're a Mastodon user, then include YSK after @youshouldknow. This is a community to share tips and tricks that will help you improve your life.
Rule 2- Your post body text must include the reason WHY YSK:
In your post's text body, you must include the reason "Why" YSK: It’s helpful for readability, and informs readers about the importance of the content.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Posts and comments which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding non-YSK posts.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-YSK posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
Rule 7- You can't harass or disturb other members.
If you harass or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
If you are a member, sympathizer or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
For further explanation, clarification and feedback about this rule, you may follow this link.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- The majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Unless included in our Whitelist for Bots, your bot will not be allowed to participate in this community. To have your bot whitelisted, please contact the moderators for a short review.
Rule 11- Posts must actually be true:
Disinformation, trolling, and being misleading will not be tolerated. Repeated or egregious attempts will earn you a ban. This also applies to filing reports: If you continually file false reports YOU WILL BE BANNED! We can see who reports what, and shenanigans will not be tolerated. We are not here to ban people who said something you don't like.
Rule 12- Linking directly to a video as a source is not acceptable.
Video only posts are responsible for an outsized portion of rules violations. Your post must contain text and meet the requirements of the previous rules.
Rule 13- If you file a report, include what specific rule is being violated and how.
Partnered Communities:
You can view our partnered communities list by following this link. To partner with our community and be included, you are free to message the moderators or comment on a pinned post.
Community Moderation
For inquiry on becoming a moderator of this community, you may comment on the pinned post of the time, or simply shoot a message to the current moderators.
Credits
Our icon(masterpiece) was made by @clen15!
It's true and I won't turn off my vpn for companies that do this crap.
Thanks Imgur for saving me from Imgur
Prepare this is gonna get a lot worse, though.
You don't see imgur because you use a VPN.
I don't see imgur because I won't enable their Javascript.
We are not the same.
I don't see imgur because I use a vpn and also because I am in the UK. We's diffrunt.
Innit
I have to use a VPN to see imgur pics because the UK government is run by wankers 😭 And I don't even live in the UK proper, I'm in N. Ireland, but I'm subject to those bullshit laws with zero recourse.
Did I just become an IRA man? 👀
The IRA existed for a reason, that reason never really went away.
I live in California and still get randomly geoIPed to the UK. I start noticing it when imgur stops loading.
It's funny really... what was the quote? You either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain.
Imgur was started back in the day to provide a no-bullshit image host, because all the others were too corporate / too monetized / too much bullshit/enshittification. So MrGrim started Imgur to fix that.
Then MrGrim took a bunch of VC money, and they eventually sold out, and now the result is the sad shell of what it once was today.
Yeah. I remember ye olde days of Imgur. NSFW in gallery and stuff. Now it's just shitty. It was a pretty gradual thing. I don't even remember exactly what made me stop using it.
Shit even without a VPN, it might not work unless you make damn sure to link the correct direct image link and not the imgur container link. This has been an issue with imgur on other social media for years now.
Could you please specify how to tell them apart?
The correct one has a file extension.
You get the image URL by right-clicking on the image and selecting ‘copy image link’ or whatever it is in your browser. It looks like ‘i.imgur.com/33blahbleh.jpg’, whereas the page URL is ‘imgur.com/gallery/cat-making-pizza-33blahbleh’.
If you use the app, I doubt it that they give you the direct image URL anywhere.
It's by design, to incite people to spend time on the imgur website/app with ads instead of just using for image hosting. It used to be a nerd-friendly image hosting for redditors at the beginning, but about 3 years ago they decided it's time to try to look more respectful to make some more money out of it. They banned NSFW (and probably whatever else their investors/advertisers/payment processors don't want to see) and automatically deleting images uploaded anonymously and not accessed enough. Interestingly, similar timing as the Reddit API debacle which created a big wave of new comers to Lemmy, including myself.
They are not a reliable image hosting service anymore, by design. https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/26479362527771-Imgur-Terms-of-Service-Update
Also, anyone in the UK not using a VPN won't be able to see them, since imgur chose to block the UK rather than adhere to age verification laws.
Whatever one thinks about that legislation, other countries (including the whole of the EU and Australia) are likely to do the same and it seems likely imgur will become a US-only resource..
Well, that and due to them being investigated for how they handle children's data and access, it had appeared that a fine was heading their way.
I honestly don't get why folks use external image providers. Lemmy is perfectly capable of providing post images, just attach it and there you go. Or is it about saving free space on a server?
I also was of the assumption that imgur has turned to dogshit? Only read it in a Reddit comment before moving here, though.
It depends what they liked about Imgur in the first place, in the first couple of years, it really was a wild West platform that would host anything. Then it sort of became a social network, with one thing being the mods being really open to user suggestions and an active part of the community. The "community" was literally just the comments under images on the public feed. It was at its strongest around 2015 when a secret santa was organised completely adhoc under an image post, then turned into a formal thing. People would post images of something they were working on, accompanied by long personal stories and these would become some sort of "canon" and people would post response meme, and highlight reels of what had been shared in the last month. And then ads came. A couple of the mods left. The filters became a little more automatic, a little more prone to flagging stuff that was fine. There's still community stuff there, I just feel it's not as inspired as it once was. Everything that happened with Reddit going public didn't help.
Impur started as an amazing simple free host
Then they had to enshitify it for money.
I'm in the UK. I can only see imgur when I do use a VPN.
I'm also in the UK, and imgur blocks my VPN, so I get the worst of both worlds.
Same goes for catbox links. Either post the fatbox link instead or choose a different image host, the VPN is not getting turned off just for shitposts.
Didn't know catbox are also blocked by some as well
imgur is a swamp
Used Imgur for decades? But never browsed it. That seems weird.
No I've never bowsed imgur but I made the mistake of uploading a photo of my wife holding a chicken so I could post it to a back yard chicken forum, and the comments were enough to ensure I never posted anything there again.
Basically an unmoderated cess pool.
There is/was public upload and private upload, the UI was/is shit though.
+1 for postimg endorsement
I don't see the images when I'm on the VPN or off the VPN.
same goes for anyone using catbox.moe.
it's become such a problem I've started to block users and communities because 95% of their posts are shared catbox links.
It sounds like that's some network providers that block catbox, rather than vice versa.
Why can't I access Catbox/access files on Catbox (files.catbox.moe)?
Good question! It turns out certain governments in the world hate freedom of information, don't have net neutrality, don't see online service providers as legally exempt entities, or a combination of the three! You will have issues accessing Catbox/files on Catbox if you are connecting from the following countries or providers:
Probably the most significant ones on there from a standpoint of users here are "Australia", "Rogers", "Comcast", and "Verizon". It sounds like all of those blocks are pretty easy to bypass (like, they're either DNS-level or can be disabled by users on their router, where there's a blacklist toggle that's on by default).
PieFed allows you to block entire domains. With a PieFed account, you would be able to just block catbox.moe and never see another Catbox post again from anyone.

I just yesterday was trying to re-upload a video posted to Imgur that many people couldn't see. Is there a good, privacy-respecting service for videos? Postimage wouldn't allow me to select the MP4 file. It was under 5MB.
catbox.moe usually works, but I can't upload anything to it if my VPN is active. >...>
A lot of countries, ISPs, etc. also block Catbox. Though I am confused by the VPN problem, because I also often have issues with Catbox on a VPN, but their FAQ actually suggests to use a VPN to use the service if your country or whatever blocks it. So they clearly are not intending to wholesale block VPNs or anything.
I think the inconstancy has to do with whether your VPN of choice is allowing itself to be used for bot scraping and other shitty resource hogs. Back when AI scrapers were running openly via their own company's network and then started to get blocked by IP, the scrapers didn't stop. They just went to VPN.
So on VPN it's not unusual for me to be fine and then suddenly get blocked from sites, or just extra captchas, Cloudflare checks and the like out of the blue; I've come to assume that just means someone's using it to be shitty. Switching proxies helps occasionally, but not always. I live with it.
Don’t most Lemmy instances have their own image proxies? Or is that just for comments, you mean direct links in posts? I don’t know if those are proxied.
Just proxy Imgur links through duckduckgo with a tamper monkey script. As long as it isn't mass adopted, it should run under the radar okay for day to day browsing 😂
Don't use VPN! Easy! /S
I’m more shocked people still use Imgur for anything anymore.
Consider uploading to the fediverse
I would, except GIFs cannot be uploaded. Every single GIF I've ever tried to upload+post is met with '400 unknown error'. Hence Imgur, sometimes catbox.
Blame your instance, not "the fediverse". Sounds like your admin configured their Lemmy instance to reject GIF uploads in an attempt to save on storage space because GIF files are so large compared to modern formats like WebP, AVIF, JPEGXL, etc. But some instances do allow GIFs. I just posted this last week because the instance I am on does: https://quokk.au/static/media/posts/pt/SI/ptSIPHNTlAYA1Ri.gif
