Hello everyone,

Following this post, it seems that quite a few users can’t see catbox.moe pictures.

Catbox was my preferred option as they have a handy Firefox extension that allows to upload pictures with just a click, and get the link directly in the clipboard.

My understanding was also that by having the pictures on catbox, we avoided storing copies of pictures on every Lemmy instance. Is this still the case? I read a bit about proxying pictures (https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4035) and it seems like this is more related to keep all media required by an instance locally, to avoid broken links.

So long story short: what should be the recommended way to share pictures on Lemmy?

  1. Use a hoster like https://imgbb.com/
  2. Upload pictures locally
  • Blaze (he/him)OP
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    219 days ago

    Interesting, so from your admin perspective do you prefer users to use the Lemmy built-in image upload or use a link to an external hoster?

    • Ada
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      19 days ago

      We let people use the built in uploader, then offload the uploaded image to the proxy, and then redirect requests for the uploaded image URL to the proxy. It was the only way we could really deal with the volume of images without having to either limit images or force them to be external

      • Blaze (he/him)OP
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        219 days ago

        Interesting, but I guess if you had the choice that every user would use an external hoster, that would be easier for you?

        I’m trying to ease the load on instance admins as well

        • Ada
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          319 days ago

          That’s not a great user experience, so it’s not an ideal approach IMO.