I get we don’t trust these third party image hosting sites, but if it’s that or having local images that can potentially bring down instances, I’d say that’s a no brainier of a compromise.
These upload sites like imgur automatically handle image detection and take the load off smaller servers. It seems like a perfect solution got now
billygoat@catata.fish 1 year ago
The flip side of the argument is that if you also host the media you are not at risk of having broken links. I’ve seen a number of long running forums that had post bodies that contained external images that are now broken.
Of course an argument can be made that the only reason that those forums have lived for so long was due to not having costs associated with hosting media.
TWeaK@lemm.ee 1 year ago
That’s no worse than a reddit link getting borked because it’s been cross-posted and someone managed to kill the original link with a DMCA notice.
billygoat@catata.fish 1 year ago
I would say that is a different issue. DMCA could go to whatever external host as well so that doesn’t change.
My argument was about butting faith in external providers to stay alive to continue hosting media. You can also get in a situation where an external provider decides to do a mass delete like what Imgur did this past summer.
dmmeyournudes@lemmy.world 1 year ago
A post getting removed because someone threatened legal action is not the same as using an image host that goes under because no one visits their site to see their ads to pay for hosting it or because they arbitrarily purged their content or changed their link format like imgur has. Unless Lemmy hosts it’s own images it will be at risk of being purged like has happened many times over.