(image is credit to my co-mod's active series "Concept Art for James Cameron’s The Abyss, by Mœbius")
Okay, let's see if I can explain this another way:
To be clear-- any post with a lead image previously sourced to Imgur content seemed to change around half a year ago, no longer showing up as an expandable thumbnail as usual, but instead just showing a generic 'offsite' link icon, which needed to be clicked an extra time in order to see the actual content. Example:
...In which the popup image content still works in the body of the post, but not via the *lead* thumbnail, which... is fairly important for users browsing their streams, no?
Anyway, it just hit me that this issue now appears to be dealt with, at least on Lemm.ee! :D
CAVEAT 1: older, Imgur lead-sourced posts still appear to be broken in this way across the "LV," not unlike how image content was broken a ~year ago via the auto-added 'image proxy tags' by the Lemmy software. Point is-- it seems sublemmy-runners (community mods) will still need to fix such older posts by hand.
CAVEAT 2: having had some years of experience using Imgur as a pic-hosting service, I simply *cannot* recommend it if your intention is to create moderately long-lived posts. I could say more about why I'm completely baffled as to why some posts seem to last 10yrs+, while some are deleted within less than 6mos, despite featuring identical content, but what would be the point? (I would guess something along 'server-mgmt lines,' but who knows?)
CAVEAT 3: Image-hosting is obviously a whole big issue upon itself, and there are obviously MANY ways to do it, with perhaps the chief issue relating to image-permanence, so to speak. That said, if your instance is indeed Lemm.ee itself, you do have a nice, healthy 500k limit upon uploads here. And think about it-- if 'LE' or the LE's hosting site ever goes down one day, then isn't it the same, in the end?. I.e., there won't be one aspect of the site uselessly upholding the other, if that makes sense.
But I would think that's also a nice, motivating reason to get on board the train of supporting our specific instance. I mean, (as I understand it) our admin spends like US$200/mo supporting us via a colossal ~10 servers, and what do you know-- bad actors here forced him to semi-retire via too much relentlessly vile content.
I really feel like shit when I read about that stuff.
TBH, my personal lack of more useful action towards supporting our instance is rather embarrassing, frankly, and I hope to do better, but... ugh, I'm frankly pretty nervous these days, living on a rather fine economic line here, dealing with upcoming USA policy-making which could... incline me to... oof. Well, it won't be good. Anyway, thank you Sunauras, EllaS, et al for carrying on in so many ways. <3
