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

  • abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    10 hours ago

    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.

      • Axolotl_cpp@lemmy.ml
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        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

  • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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    16 hours ago

    This doesn’t seem like it’s Imgur’s fault for trying to avoid prison. Perhaps more fire is needed in your local MP’s home?

    • HereIAm@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Them blocking VPNs is a bit much though. At that point I don’t feel like it’s their responsibility.

  • sol6_vi@lemmy.makearmy.io
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    24 hours ago

    If anyone wants to selfhost their own replacement I just spun up picsur a couple months ago and highly recommend it. Dead simple and lightweight.

    • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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      16 hours ago

      How does that handle the initial flood of requests when every federated instance asks for a freshly posted image all at the same time? Or is that a smaller problem than I am imagining?

      • sol6_vi@lemmy.makearmy.io
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        13 hours ago

        All of my federated stuff has run smoothly with that kinda stuff but I don’t think picsur is fed? Is it? 👀 If it is I gotta check that out lol. Mine is isolated. Just use it to dump photos and get quick links

        • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          I could have been more clear, I meant when you post a link to your self-hosted image to lemmy, and all the various federated lemmy instances ask for it all at once. Sounds to me like it’s not an issue at all :)

    • SuluBeddu@feddit.it
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      16 hours ago

      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

    • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      14 hours ago

      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.

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      16 hours ago

      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.

    • essell@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Still waiting on that option 😟

      Actually… If every voted libdem that might work

        • essell@lemmy.world
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          1 day ago

          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.

          • outhouseperilous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            14 hours ago

            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?

          • jenesaisquoi@feddit.org
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            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

              • jenesaisquoi@feddit.org
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                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.

                • essell@lemmy.world
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                  1 day ago

                  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.

    • Jeena@piefed.jeena.net
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      2 days ago

      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.

      • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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        13 hours ago

        I’m using Boost for Lemmy and I never questioned how it works, but I can just add images here straight from my gallery.

          • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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            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.

      • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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        2 days ago

        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.

          • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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            1 day ago

            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.

            • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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              13 hours ago

              This brought back memories. We used to have a local image host and there was a hidden /recents page that I discovered. It listed all the recent uploads by users. I don’t think it was meant to be public, because the shit I could find there was both too personal and NSFW

        • aeiou@piefed.social
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          Catbox doesn’t work properly on some US mobile carriers and I think Comcast, returns a DNS error

          • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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            16 hours ago

            I just loaded it through a Comcast connection, so it’s definitely not an IP block or route issue. I don’t use Comcast’s dns though and I’m completely unwilling to do so even for test purposes so you could still be right.

      • Armand1@lemmy.worldOP
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        I just upload directly to the instance, at least that’s what I think I’m doing. My app lets me do that (Boost).

        • hereiamagain@sh.itjust.works
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          23 hours ago

          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.

          • gigachad@piefed.social
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            1 day ago

            Interesting, I am using the voyager mobile app. Does that mean the functionality is there but the PieFed frontend hasn’t integrated it?

            • Jeena@piefed.jeena.net
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              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.

  • The Velour Fog @lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

    • vateso5074@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        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.

        • The_Decryptor@aussie.zone
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          12 hours ago

          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.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      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.

  • Muad'dib@sopuli.xyz
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    Good job Imgur, kick the brits off your site until they stop being wankers.

    • falseWhite@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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        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?

        • falseWhite@lemmy.world
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          “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

          • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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            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?

  • remon@ani.social
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    2 days ago

    Not really a shit post.

    Sucks for the UK.

    Works fine with a VPN for me.

    • Armand1@lemmy.worldOP
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      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.

      • remon@ani.social
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        I just don’t see why we should boycott imgur because of something the UK government did to them.

        • Armand1@lemmy.worldOP
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          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.

        • Anomnomnomaly@lemmy.org
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          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.

          • remon@ani.social
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            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.

            • FishFace@lemmy.world
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              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)

            • Anomnomnomaly@lemmy.org
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              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.

              • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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                No, the entire internet absolutely does not ask that. Perhaps you meant the commercial for-profit internet?

  • Constant Pain@lemmy.world
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    As a brazilian, I’ve been having all sorts of issues with media being geolocked on Lemmy. I feel like the platform is becoming increasingly hostile to me.

  • Zomg@piefed.world
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    Yeah I’ve had this issue when using Mullvad. Definitely a VPN specific issue.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • ayyy@sh.itjust.works
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        Where are you hosting your custom VPN? I assume some kind of server rented from a data center. Which means your IP address will be from a data center, not a residential or mobile address.

      • Zomg@piefed.world
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        Because up address spaces of known hosting providers and VPN providers is known.

    • Anomnomnomaly@lemmy.org
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      No, it’s because imgur has refused to conduct the simple ‘are you over the age of XX’ when people create accounts, which is required by law… there’s no verification of anything involved. Just a tick the box exercise… they couldn’t even be bothered to do that and that’s why they’re being investigated and are facing massive fines for years of refusal to do what every other site has done for probably 2 decades now… It’s got nothing to do with the draconian online safety act that was recently brought in… it’s imgur throwing their toys out of the pram and screaming ‘LALALALALALALA’ we can’t hear you now. it will have zero effect on the investigation and fines for their previous failings to follow the law… it’s literally cutting of their nose to spite their face.

    • FishFace@lemmy.world
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      Probably not directly, but we don’t know because Imgur has unprofessionally decided to return an incorrect raw JSON error message instead of explaining the block.

      There is a message from the ICO noting the block and that it was considering fining them for failing to take user reported age as part of account creation. This is different from the OSA age verification