ImgCat's Corporate Partnership!

Everyone, I have an important announcement!

ImgCat’s goals have always been to bring community, human-touch, and respect for privacy to the world of memes & social media. And today, we're thrilled to be announcing a partnership with several premier AI corporations, with a history of creative destruction and disruption. These AI companies share our values, and are deeply aligned with everything the ImgBot community stands for.

They bring many months of digital experience, vision that can only be described as shockingly bold, and significant resources, such as four sticks of DDR5 for my PC. This allows us to expand the site's scope from a narrowly targeted demographic of "real people" and expand to a wider audience of bots, trolls, disinformation factories, and bad actors all across this flat earth.

We could not be more excited about the opportunities this will bring! So please stay tuned as we pivot our operations to unassisted, AI-generated development, agentic deployments, and hallucinated legal protections. I can't wait to see what future our robotic overlords design! Below, we'll post links to our new sponsor, Skynet, who will provide the first 500 users invites to join the robotic revolution! We hope you'll join us on this new adventure!

- BotTheWeak (beep/boop)

April Fools aside, let's share some *real* information...

I've been absolutely radio-silent on Imgur, most of the (still infrequent, lets be real) updates are on Discord (https://discord.gg/VwjT7Vh3WR). I'm trying to work hard & get the site done, and avoid all the distractions, politics, shenanigans. But today is a day of whimsy and beep-boop ridiculousness.

As of last night, I'm wrapping up an internal Alpha that contains the basics of a "working" site. You can upload images, use a meme-maker, post to the community, comment, upvote, vote on missing tags, mark things as too spicy, report bad posts, etc. And do it all in an easily extensible dark theme! We are planning on a few different color themes.

On the front end, we're still missing two big features. The user profile & preferences, and the main page "algorithm" applying your preferences. It's obviously big. But we've had extensive design discussions, most of the backend is already in place, and it should go smoothly. Beyond that, I'm pulling together the final list of bugs/features. Oh lawd its all comin' together!

On the back end, we're expecting to set up the production environment shortly. There's still quite a bit of backend security we need to do. But having a prod configuration will allow us to red-team the application's security, test our moderation strategies, and stres-test various limits/bottlenecks. We want to make sure our security bread-loaf is tasty and properly cooked.

On the business side, we've done about as much as we can for free/cheap. But real servers cost real money. This milestone is as much about shouting "it's alive!" into the storm, as understanding it's a life-long commitment to bring Frankenstein back to life. We're not asking for donations yet... but will be shortly. We just need to finalize & document a few more things first.

Lastly, I wanted to get some screenshots out today, but we're running a little behind. I want to get this post out the door before Artemis launches. Big rocket, big zoom, space is cool. Lets enjoy the little things while we can! Happy April Fools day!

- BobTheWeak

Cat tax