ourari
26984
1082
28
Image by @BonusDad via @capngoat
To catch up, read these posts by @ElbowDeepInAHorse, @Lassannn, @BoomyGordo:
• https://imgur.com/gallery/xt7kPj7
• https://imgur.com/gallery/j0snC3z
• https://imgur.com/gallery/FNwBzTU
There are probably more posts about it. Feel free to add those in the comments :)
My suggestion for an Imgur successor:
Pixelfed is an open-source image sharing app similar to Instagram. You can host a server yourself, modify the front and back-ends, etc. It allows for sharing albums. Not sure if video is supported (yet), but the people behind Pixelfed are also working on Loops, an open source TikTok-like app, which does support video.
I'm sure our community has a few devs milling about. It probably wouldn't take a lot of work to modify Pixelfed to look and feel like (old) Imgur?
If you have the skills and the motivation, please feel free to run with this idea.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelfed
• https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/14/decentralized-instagram-alternative-pixelfed-launches-mobile-apps/
• https://pixelfed.org/
• https://loops.video/
Pixelfed and Loops are federated, so they are interoperable with other social platforms like Mastodon and Threads, which is a nice bonus.
I've been here for so long. I'm not sure what online life looks like without Imgur any more. Would be nice if (what is left of) this community survives the demise of this platform.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourselves
TheGriffin
Im on Pixelfed, dont use it much but its there
TsubakiTragic
the man who can turn any profitable business into a garbage dump.
squishybaker
I am sick of this site, as it's just US political slop, AI slop, and fuck tons of bots where reporting does fuck all.
Yehpehgeh
F
naught101
Pixelfed is great. All it really needs is more users..
Joyousjoyfuljoyness
I've only been here since 2021 and, yes, it's died off a LOT. Same with many other platforms, like Facebook and Reddit. I'm seeing a ton more engagement and community on Bluesky and Mastodon, so your idea of running an imgur-like replacement with the Fediverse is a good idea.
barstr7
They've been saying that about Tumblr for over a decade but everyone here and on the shithole formerly known as Twitter still get half their memes from there.
UpwardFacingKnight
Goodbye Imgur
XCadencex
Well, well, well…mostly a lurker here but I have to admit that you do not seem to get as much engagement here as you use to.
Stoicnihilist
Ye. Seems my current account has 12 year old trophy. It's no longer a community. It's just been part of my routine for too long at this point. I'm happy the smut is back it's mostly bots.
timtheenchanter3
Thanks for the context. Already quit FB, Twitter, Amazon, Instagram... did not expect also to add IMGUR this year to the list.
I guess this is goodbye.
RCSpotz
We need a poll to help us all find a new home
Mewmus
Imgur has gone downhill
IrrelevantIrrelevant
Remember folks: The winner of the imgur replacement race will be whichever medium is linked to by other sites the most reliably.
Be prepared for a lot of failures before you start building momentum with the one site you thought wasn't going to make it.
PirateRubberDuck
Sometimes I wonder if a community owned social media site could work.
ourari
Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. are showing that it does work. I've been on Mastodon since 2016 (time flies!) and all the servers are owned by different members or groups in the community. That's exactly why I'm suggesting we build a new Imgur on top of Pixelfed :)
ruint
RIP imgur
SecondSince
Kinda, but it's been a shambling corpse for a LONG time by now. We should have mercy-killed it long ago.
ElectricRage
This, unfortunately, kills the site...
ElbowDeepInAHorse
No don't you'll tear it!
VeryLongTimeLurker
But I have all my fake points here!
aPaleHorseNamedDerp
@op video sharing is already supported on pixelfed. Building a Frontend that resembles old imgur shouldn't be too bad I suppose.
Any idea where to organize like-minded people?
ourari
Nice! Hm, preferably not a walled garden like Discord imo, but it would be up to the devs, I guess. A hashtag on Mastodon, a group on Signal, a Discourse forum?
ourari
Or Element https://element.io/
ToSisPoS
Community schmunity, I just want a place where DerekM can post his water colours again.
ourari
He probably could again. The rules around NSFW stuff have been relaxed a little. https://www.pcmag.com/news/imgur-loosens-restrictions-on-images-containing-adult-humour
ToSisPoS
I imagine once-bitten
ourari
Agreed. All the more reason to make our place, by and for Imgurians!
Amomani
I generally don't like silos where I cant see any content without creating an account first and need to download an app. This is a big ask....
ourari
Well, I'm not asking anyone to sign up to Pixelfed. I am asking for developers to create a new Imgur based on Pixelfed.
Amomani
Well I tried to sign up.... have been waiting 10 minutes for a verification email... this isn't going well.
Amomani
Lol. Tried another instance got the confirmation email and now the app crashes everytime I hit explore.
EroticZombiePants
Problem is the extensive posters will inevitably splinter off to different sites instead of mass moving to the same place, so nowhere will really be the same as before.
MakeItBackAlright
Build it and they will come
ourari
Yeah it won't be a carbon copy either way. Imgur today doesn't resemble Imgur form yesteryear either. But we might be able to take some of the good stuff with us.
SpamYarBlockers
Maybe a movement / migration can be started before it is too late and publicized here, though I wonder if the owners would detect and squash anything that seems like an early exit
hoopsnek
I have felt that imgur has been dead for over 13 years. I'm still here though, as there's still no place like it.
VoidForScreaming
Appreciate the tag @op BonusDad here. They nerfed my account when I complained about the outsourcing of the mods in creative ways. I'd like to contribute this updated image for this post:
ourari
Lucky you stumbled upon this post anyway! Appreciate your contribution :)
VoidForScreaming
With how frequently I'm scrolling the front page, I don't think luck was part of it, haha. It was delightfully surreal to see an image I made in the feed. Very much a, "huh," with a smirk moment.
BobTheWeak
Yup.... I went to bed thinking about this. How to architect the stack, layers, tech, caching, hosting, etc. Imgur's weakness is tagging, so how would we improve that? We'd get overrun with bots and spam immediately, so how can we detect, isolate, and quarantine those sources? I honestly landed on AI for some of this (using classic AI image recognition & classification, not modern "AI"). But... there are ways to do this better.
redheathen
did yall get this rolling?
ourari
Like this: https://fedithreat.net/
janeQdoe
Then! Mods for the jerk commentors. It's no small task. Sigh
biffoboffo
I’m no architect but can help in other ways.
louster
I'm not sure if it helps, but back in the early period of imgur tags could both be added when publishing, and also voted on by other users. This was how a lot of us dealt with the shitloads of anti-feminist and "i identify as an attack helicopter" crap during those years.
ourari
Yeah, moderation would be a big challenge. If we'd use Pixelfed, we'd benefit from their moderation features.
djangojazz
A lot more anime than ever before and bad comics.
mairusupawa
I'm in. But if I already got an account on the Fediverse through Mastodon, do I need to sign up on a Pixelfed instance anyway or are there bridges?
ourari
https://pixelfed.blog/p/2023/feature/introducing-sign-in-with-mastodon-streamlining-sign-up-and-login-on-pixelfed
ariania
pixelfeeds dosent have a website? rofl (u have to have the app to view shit, boooooooooooooooooooooooo)
ourari
No, you can view posts on the web and log into instances on the web. But I'm not asking anyone to create an account on Pixelfed instances. I am asking developers to use the open source code behind it to create a new Imgur.
celestedrake
I think that we should at least stay just long enough to really mess with them on the 29th. Go full out on the weird. Hopefully crash servers and/or demonitize them due to too many things getting past whatever mods they have.
heyletsbefriends
is there a way to download my image library in any kind of organized way? i have about 3500 images here, mostly organized in albums.
ourari
If you log in to Imgur in a browser and go to your account settings, you should see an option to download all the images in your account.
CrunchWrapFrappuccinoo
This place is mostly repost bots these days. I'm going on 11 years here and boy has it gone down hill.
ReposterCallerOuterMan
👀
MrKirkwood
Here for 13 years so sad.
causality
Eh, I stopped caring when Alan and Sarah let corrupted mods run wild banning anybody who criticized them and artificially boosting their friends' posts to front page.
InfocalypseRising
It really is nuts. Stuff used to have 10k+ upvotes, now it's rare to see something over 1k
Foxcross
I love the random down votes on things that use to never get them
BenYourFriend
Tempted to downvote you for the bit… but I also don’t like downvoting without good reason
d3jake
I've been here 9 (apparently) and it's been a constant downward slide. It feels like what happened to Sears: Bought out, squeezed for whatever value that could be had, and discarded.
blaghart
It went downhill circa the 2016 election when people drank the kool aid and started uncritically repeating what bots said about "their team"
Andunistar
I miss the explosion of trends like javert that maybe stayed around a little bit to long but were creative and charming all the same.
HelloToe
Man, I can't even think of the last major ongoing meme that actually originated here...
nclu
I'm also just across the 11 year mark. Politics has consumed everything everywhere. But, imho, the mods did some good work cleaning things up over this period. In those old times (and I lurked for a few years before signing up), there were a lot of posts where the "correct" reply was a casual racism. I'm sad the place has declined, but glad we've built a community with some respectable values.
shorey66
Who came here when Digg went shit
Muffyns
I think it just need advertising. Alot of people who never used this site don't know what it is
Cliperinoposterino
Imgur started dying during the 1st Trump term when this place was completely taken over by paid political spammers who only posts between working hours during Mon to Fri. They should've cracked down back then. No body likes to come to a fun place only seeing wall to wall political posts. Imgur added a filter to allow use to have some control but is too late.
IDontKnowWhatToDoAnymoreAndImTired
LOL at calling other people propagandists while you're spamming out comments insisting that Trump never had anything to do with Epstein and pushing other right-wing lies.
Cliperinoposterino
Is that your opinion or you are making statement of facts?
IDontKnowWhatToDoAnymoreAndImTired
You know your comment history is public, right? Literally anyone on Imgur can click on your profile and see all your comments insisting Trump is innocent, that immigrants should go home, and accusing people of antisemitism for not supporting Israeli genocide.
Cliperinoposterino
This time around, there are less propagandist, probably due to Trump removed their funding source. But they are still here, effectively ruining the front page. Regular visitors can probably spot the shilled political posters whose posts get to the front page immediately and with almost no interactions; suddenly gaining hundreds of upvotes but with only a few comments.
Cliperinoposterino
I remember this particular propagandist on Imgur with the account name Bstev. Making the same political posts with the same format every working day. Then suddenly account's deleted when Biden started his term. If you google "Imgur Bstev" you can still find traces of the account's existence. Imgur admin allow propagandists take over their website and ruining it.
Cliperinoposterino
There was also another group of political spammers who only post twitter screenshots of Jeff Tiedrich's twitter posts. Jeff, a failed movie director, whose only relevance is his anti Trump stance. Those posters have all gone at the start of Biden's term. But I suspect same people, some of them are back, under different account names.
Metallica93
But it's not like no one saw this coming. It has happened to every social media site (and a large chunk of sites, in general). It will just get replaced by something else in a handful of years.
thisisnotfineffs
https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2024-04-04-teach-me-how-to-shruggie-kagi-caaa88c221f2
Metallica93
The majority of users here are probably around my age. Them not knowing how this works is confusing. They literally grew up with MySpace.
CrunchWrapFrappuccinoo
Some one should make a lifecycle chart of social media platforms.
Toqom
The greed of those who make it, companies being bought make the companies shit, every time. Sold companies should be forced to share those profits with the employees they are about to get fired
AndrlCh
It is really sad to see happen again and again. A bunch of the old gaming forums and "geek culture" sites I used to frequent are all but ghost towns now. I know some of those communities have moved to Discord, but I never really got the same sense of community from that since everything can just go by so fast.
Metallica93
Sure, but this post (and the three "expert user" opinions) pretending it's some brand new phenomena is just... what? It's decades old.
DietCokeIsMyDrugOfChoice
I feel that way about LiveJournal. Honestly, Imgur feels a lot like LJ in the sense of community and interactions, and is part of why I like it so much here. I'll be really sad to see it go away. :(
HurricaneShade
Are our Favorite Folders gone???
ourari
Nah, I still have mine (on desktop in a browser), but maybe your Android app is having issues?
EroticZombiePants
So basically they are now gone forever for the app users.
ourari
It's probably a bug? Idk.
EroticZombiePants
I'm a laptop user too, so I don't know.
admweirdbeard
Mine are unchanged on android app
HurricaneShade
I'm on the android app... my favorites are gone
usingYourMomAsAHat
Im also on android and favorites are still here, weird
HurricaneShade
Still gone.. I even restarted my phone.. I don't want to log out and get back in... don't remember my password.. lol
usingYourMomAsAHat
Hehe know the feels. It would be interesting to know which kind of response you get from imgurs backend, assuming you either get a 4xx of 5xx response (eg something is either wrong on your end, or their end). I guess you could use a tool like httptoolkit to intercept the request being returned from ingur when you try to retrieve the favorites but ye that might be too much work lol
mikeatike
If you have the same problem as me, I can get to the folders from my profile, but when trying to add an image from my favorites from a comment, the folders button is gone.