A case to preserve the imgur community alternative in the Fediverse

Quite a few of you may have heard of the Fediverse before. While it may seem complicated, think about it as email. You have, for example, Gmail. Your buddy has Proton Mail. You can still send and receive emails from different services.

If we take this approach to, say, social media, you have plenty of interesting possibilities.

This is all powered by the W3C standard for decentralised social media. You can self-host an instance, and still follow people from other services.

For anyone interested, it works kinda like this:

The most popular service would be Mastodon, and many of you have likely heard of it. But there are many more, and they are built to work together.

You even have a Fediverse YouTube of sorts, called PeerTube:

Apps that work better for image sharing would be Pixelfed.

I get that many of you are already on Bluesky, but bear in mind that they don't use ActivityPub, and the company still holds significant power over the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, ActivityPub is growing, and hopefully, we can get some interoperability between both standards.

I humbly suggest that we don't rely just on Bluesky, we've been let down before. I'd really like to preserve our community of endearing weirdos. It would give the community unprecedented control over the platform. At least as a fallback.

We can use a preexisting service, subscribe to imgur tags, and keep connected. Pixelfed can be interesting too.

It would be cool if we had a project to build our own, community-owned imgur. I know it's technically challenging, but we have a lot of talented devs here. Could be fun!

Here are some examples of stuff built in the ActivityPub ecosystem:

https://github.com/BasixKOR/awesome-activitypub

Thank you for your attention to this matter.