The above image is all us folk in the UK see when you do, and if we try to use a VPN + incognito, we get this:
403 means forbidden, so the message is disingenuous.
They must have put some effort into block lists for VPN servers. Even if it works for some of us, it’s not worth it.
For more information on this, see this article: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gzxv5gy3qo
Imgur has been shitty for years at this point. They kept fucking with the UI when all I wanted to do was upload images and share the link. They should have stayed in their lane, not try to reinvent their platform as social media. Then their wholesale blocking of VPN traffic? Tired of that nonsense. I use imgbb now.
I will say I don’t like the direction imgur went, but to play devil’s advocate, I don’t think there was any way around it.
The problem is that being an image host used by millions of users is incredibly expensive, and between needing to pay for the infrastructure, content moderators, and (in this case) regulatory compliance, it all adds up.
The only income model they have is ads, which is why they needed to re-tool the UI to hinder users’ ability to direct share images, and converting it to a more social media type of format keeps users on the site so they can cycle in more ads for more revenue.
An ideal internet would not need to rely on ad money to work, but I’m struggling to think of what else could be done at the scale imgur operates, as donation models can barely even keep Lemmy instances above water. If ad money wasn’t a thing, would sites like imgur be able to exist? Maybe they shouldn’t, I don’t know.
Always wondered how Imgur stayed afloat in the first place. As to people whining about ads, yeah I block everything I can, but I’m not about to bitch about Imgur providing me a free service and sending ads.
Like you, I don’t see a way around it. Sites like Imgur have to be provided by private enterprise, and that requires funding. Can’t see how a subscription model works, people simply wouldn’t pay.
God forbid the government fund any of it. Look how the Brit and American politicians are fucking up sites that aren’t even government! And don’t start me on what American government sites are deleting and displaying.
There’s 2 ways to make money off sites like Imgur, charge for subscriptions with extra features, or boast about your user numbers and views and get bought by a company that wants to sell ad space.
Imgur did both.
And it’s not just known IPs from commercial providers. I rolled my own OpenVPN server on a Digital Ocean droplet. BLOCKED.
They kicked me to the new layout which I abhor, rather not use the site at all. Took me 10-minutes to find the non-obvious place they hid the option to roll it back.
People in the UK should vote for non-insane representatives, that would be more helpful
Tbf to them it’s not their fault that the once leftwing party “randomly” decided to put a boneless liberal right before an election that had them winning for sure
I wonder what lobbies and their media have to say about that magic trick
He’s not boneless! His dick-bone is well suited for ratfucking the left!
The alternatives who are most likely to take power:
Farage who will abduct and deport my wife.
The Tories who can see Farage being popular with bigots and aiming to be even more cunty.
Still waiting on that option 😟
Actually… If every voted libdem that might work
Ah yes, more power to the rich, that ought to fix it
You got Better option?
I love the Greens and their current direction, but they’re at the point where they’re saying unworkable things to get left wing support, knowing they’ll never have to follow through because they won’t win enough power.
I’m not familiar with UK parties to be honest, outside of Labour, the two make-rich-people-richer parties and the insanity party I don’t even know which parties there are. If I were British I’d vote for the leftmost and most environmentally friendly party I could find. If that is the Greens then that sounds good to me
Well, me too.
Sadly they’re a long long way from any real power.
That’s probably keeping many likeminded people from voting for them. A result of the deeply unfair FPTP voting system. In my country we long ago had a similar system, it resulted in a single party state, until it was reformed to a proportional system.
That would definitely increase both voting and representation for the Greens, yes.
Tactical voting is a big thing in the UK to mitigate some of the imbalance of the FPTP system, along with informal electoral pacts between parties.
There’s a reason why fringe parties tend to remain on the fringe.
There’s always direct action.
Which is the only way anyone ever won anything for the left anyway.
Inclusive of but not necessarily violence. But also apparently painting stuff or saying that’s bad is terrorism, so, I mean, why not?
Yeah. Uh. That’s like 25% less helpful for them than it is for the Americans, even if the situation isn’t quite as apocalyptic. They’ll need to actually do stuff.
Not really a shit post.
Sucks for the UK.
Works fine with a VPN for me.
I put it on here because it’s one of the communities that posts the most photos and I’ve seen a few Imgur embeds posted here in the last day or two. Feel free to forward to any other channel.
As for it working for you, yeah I suspect they have some IP ban lists, and it definitely won’t cover every VPN, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask someone to use a different VPN to see your post. Not that you were necessarily implying that.
I just don’t see why we should boycott imgur because of something the UK government did to them.
You’re not being asked to, the UK govt hasn’t done anything to them… they did this to themselves by failing to do anything about age verification long before the online safety act came in recently. This is about their failings over the prior years to do basic age checks that have been common on the internet for decades now… going dark in the UK doesn’t affect the ongoing investigations or the fines that will be imposed… they’re basically throwing their toys out of the pram and shouting LALALALALALALALA we can’t hear you anymore.
Imgur had gone to dogshit anyway, it’s no real loss and the new owners keep making it worse and after the last round of protests from users, went on a mass banning and censorship campaign to further alienate and anger the users they desperately need to shove an ever increasing amount of ads too.
Blame the right people… the greedy, ignorant techbros who want to extract every ounce of ad revenue they can to line their own pockets at the expense of killing the product they bought.
they did this to themselves by failing to do anything about age verification long before the online safety act came in recently
Good. They shouldn’t. Online age verification is an authoritarian scam.
You’ve failed to understand the problem entirely… the entire internet asks users to confirm they are above a certain age when creating accounts… and that happened because the USA demanded it. There’s nothing authoritarian about it… it’s a simple ‘Are you over 13yrs of age’ and you tick yes… that was it.
Funny how it doesn’t seem to be a problem in any other country.
No, the entire internet absolutely does not ask that. Perhaps you meant the commercial for-profit internet?
What they are being fined for (potentially) is not asking for users’ age during account creation. Not whatever you think (in spite of op being clear)
Good for them.
Why is that good?
Why does a jpg server need age verification?
I’m not calling us to not use it as a boycott measure. It’s more of a practical consideration for other users like myself who won’t get to see your posts at all.
There are alternative approaches that don’t cause these problems so I’d like people to use them.
"both the ICO and Ofcom - the media regulator enforcing the Online Safety Act - said Imgur suspending access for UK users had been its own “commercial decision”
They’re just trying to avoid getting fined by the UK.
Fucking hell. As someone in the UK who used Imgur, this sucks. Like fuck sake, I’m being fucked by the OSA and the reaction to the OSA.
That sounds like a you problem, sorry.
I feel like making some memes mocking the UK and posting them there now.
Victim blaming much? We didn’t ask for this. In fact, we specifically asked not for this. Same as how most US folk didn’t ask for a dictator to run their country and making fun of them for living in a dystopia is a bit tasteless.
It’s not a big huge deal, sure, but I also think it’s not a big ask for posters to do things differently.
But Trump got the most votes. If they didn’t want a dictator in their country they shuldn’t have voted for it.
We didn’t ask for this
The UK is a democratic country. The electorate saw fit to put insane greedy cunts with sociopathic traits in power. Also to leave the EU, lol
Fight within your political system, while you still have one, don’t work around its effects.
People still use imgur?
I do, that’s the only one I can remember which I can embed easily here.
What are the alternatives? I wish I could just upload images for comments in PieFed.
Catbox is basically what Imgur used to be before it went to absolute shit. You upload images, you can link to them. That’s it. You don’t need to create an account, but if you do, you can see everything you’ve uploaded. It’s free. Not really sure what more you can ask for in an image host.
Catbox is also nonfunctional on some VPNs.
Didn’t know that! I use an always-on VPN and I’ve never had issues with Catbox (but imgur blocks me), for what it’s worth.
Catbox doesn’t work properly on some US mobile carriers and I think Comcast, returns a DNS error
Can you just browse other peoples uploads on there looking for funny pics and memes?
Nope! It’s an image host, not a social media platform, which in my opinion is the best thing about it.
Asking the important questions. I need the shitposting, not just the image hosting.
I just upload directly to the instance, at least that’s what I think I’m doing. My app lets me do that (Boost).
I’m on boost too. Let’s find out, here’s a picture uploaded using the built in function.
Well I’ll be darned, I thought it was using imgur, but I guess it’s straight to the instance. Neat.
Wdym? Can’t you see this image I am just embedding on the fly rn?
I can see it, But in PieFed I can’t upload one.
Interesting, I am using the voyager mobile app. Does that mean the functionality is there but the PieFed frontend hasn’t integrated it?
That is interesting, I just checked and your image is indeed hosted by PieFed itself and not by any external service like I assumed that the 3rd party apps would implement as a workaround.
I’m using Boost for Lemmy and I never questioned how it works, but I can just add images here straight from my gallery.
You are on Lemmy, I’m on PieFed
It doesn’t matter, it’s a clone with same functionality. There are users below uploading the same way I did and it uploads on their instance (piefed).
Realistically it’s just your front end lacking image upload function, but there is back-end for it.
To me it does matter because I can’t upload pictures to comments.
Until this I used it as my daily meme scroller
It sounds like the platform of choice for talking shit about the UK these days.
so what you say is, we have a means to post things in such a way the british can’t see them… 🧐 /j
wait am I british o.O
sorry you had to find out this way 😔
wait it doesn’t work for me either
I’m a Yankee?!
It does not work for me and i am in Italy…
it doesn’t even work for me lol
either my instances CDN uses a UK server somewhere and that blocks it, or you just can’t post imgur images in comments
i guess we are all british on this cursed day… 😔
At least we are not french jk
Edit: after looking at your profile i want correct me, at least i am not french
eille toé chose chu pô française non plus surveille ton language tabarnak
(/j)
Are you canadian? I found out that tabarnak is a canadian term, by the way tabarnak sound like a name from some Dungeons and Dragons inspirated story lol
Also happens to me, even if i’m not in the UK.
Yeah, with my Italian ISP, Imgur doesn’t work. We need a better alternative.
Changing DNS should solve it since Italian ISPs block things only on a DNS level, i had the same problem for fitgirl and changing DNS solved it
No, it’s not DNS censoring. It’s Imgur “firewall” that blocks some Italian IPs.
Yeah I’ve had this issue when using Mullvad. Definitely a VPN specific issue.
My VPN is custom and they block me. How can they tell the traffic is being routed via VPN? I should know this, can’t quite remember how that works.
Why? I don’t post stuff so I don’t really care either way, but free vpns are so easy to find and use and the paid options aren’t that expensive either.
Let’s give this classic poem a tweak shall we…
First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trans community (The UK is currently here) And I did not speak out Because I was not trans
Then they came for all people of colour (The USA is now here) And I did not speak out Because I was not a person of colour
Then they came for me And there was no one left To speak out for me
Not caring because it doesn’t directly affect you is how you end up on this road to fascism to begin with. It’s why there have been thousands of arrests of innocent people in the UK for simply protesting about a ban on a group of people who threw paint on some RAF planes and vandalised some genocide supporting israeli weapons manufacturer… because some people do care about others, because they have compassion and a conscience.
If the UK goes ahead with plans to ban protests entirely as they saying… those numbers will increase because it won’t stop the people and the numbers continue to grow and if you try to stamp it out, there will only be one way it ends… with state authorised violence and death against people protesting the killing of innocent civilians.
That’s the road you are on with that attitude, and then you’ll be screaming that last line and playing the victim.
Well done for not reading the post
What do you think you’re paying with when you’re using a “free” VPN?
should be: 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
It’s not due to legal reasons though. They just decided to exit UK, because they’re trying to avoid paying fines for previous infringements.
It’s not due to legal reasons though. They just decided to exit UK, because they’re trying to avoid paying fines for previous infringements.
What previous infringements?
“The ICO launched its investigation into Imgur in March - saying it would probe whether the companies were complying with both the UK’s data protection laws, and the children’s code.”.
Just do some research dude
it would probe whether the companies were complying with both the UK’s data protection laws, and the children’s code
So it was for legal reasons. Wow, such surprise.
Just do some research dude
Could you not tell that I wasn’t seriously questioning what the infringements were, and was poking fun at your comment that it wasn’t for legal reasons?
Nobody forced them to quit the UK, there are no laws saying they can’t operate in the UK. So what legal reasons?
- Imgur leaves the UK because they’re allegedly uncompliant with data protection laws
- “Legal: Of, relating to, or concerned with law” - wordnik.com
Imgur hosts pictures of naked people. Pictures of naked people are illegal to send to the UK. How is that not a law saying Imgur can’t operate in the UK?
I also see this and I’m not in the UK.
American here. I have my own OpenVPN server, not commercial, and I get this error on Firefox but was not seeing it in Edge until I closed the browser and reopened. It’s how I know I forgot and left the VPN running.
Interesting. Where are you based?
USA 🤠
Oh, is it because some states have the same sort of age verification laws?
Probably because I’m using a VPN. Mullvad specifically. I guess I should have mentioned that
I noticed with some basic testing with VPNs that a PC running Linux and a VPN is fairly obscured with no DNS or IP leaks. But when doing the same with an android phone, even with a good VPN, the browser still passes unique identifiers of the phone.
So I’m thinking the ones who say they can still use imgur are probably accessing it via a PC and not a phone.
It’s not accessible with a pc either.
