Unfortunately it’s a side effect of disabling uploads, it is possible to have externally hosted avatars (field is just a URL linking to the image) but isn’t officially supported by lemmy-ui yet, hopefully it can be in the future though, I made an issue for it on the GitHub to hopefully get it supported (linked in my other comment).
Comment on lemm.ee plans for mitigating image upload abuse
lagomorphlecture@lemm.ee 10 months agoNor sure about links but avatars and banners were intentional because those would be images, and all image uploads are suspended for now.
Draconic_NEO@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Anonymousllama@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Might be useful to adjust the field themselves so instead of looking for a local image, they can pull in something from an external URL (hosted on imgur). That way at least avatars / banners will still work without the onus being on the server.
Hopefully they sort out all this stuff eventually
Draconic_NEO@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Would be easily doable, I was able to do it on my account here since the user settings config just contains a link to an image which can point at pictrs or at an external image hosted elsewhere so using the API (in my case using a third party app being built by my friend) you can replace avatars with externally hosted images, I made an issue on the lemmy-ui GitHub to hopefully get that feature integrated officially.