I don't care enough about the fediverse to waste my time on that, and if I did I'd probably go with piefed anyway.
In any case, as I said in another post you can trivially check for yourself how removing the proxy fixes the issue (in short, grab the url from any image posted in the frontpage or wherever, remove the proxy bits and fix the encoding, and it'll work without any issues).
Nobody replaces images with ads in eg S3 buckets
Nobody replaces images with ads in eg S3 buckets yet.
It's an inevitable result of enshittification. Provide a service, get users hooked, extract as much wealth as possible from them, when you can't extract any more without them leaving extract information from them, sell it to advertisers, extract as much wealth as possible from them, in part by turning as much of your service as possible into ads.
And we're talking amazon here. You know they'll be amongst the first three big companies to do it (alphabet's gonna be first, of course, they're already doing it with google search results, but amazon isn't any better, just less ad focused for now).
Calling it a proxy doesn't mean it is one.
We have no way of knowing what's behind https://lemmynsfw.com/api/v3/image_proxy. All we have is the admins' word that it is one (wait, no, not even that, since they've never told us about it to start with).
All we know is that our urls are being hijacked (and that this is causing them not to work, and that the reason the devs — which are known to be untrustworthy — tried to justify this option with doesn't hold water) without anyone asking us first or warning us..
If I care about privacy I'll take care of that. I'll upload my images somewhere I trust or, better yet, control. If I want a proxy or CDN it'll be on my terms.
Even supposing it is a proxy, does it have a cache? Or a CDN? The whole cloudflare kerfuffle seems to suggest it does. How often do they update? If I decide to remove my image from wherever I hosted it, how long will it take for the cache to reflect that?
I don't know; lemmynsfw never told me, just like they didn't tell me they were using this alleged proxy and hijacking my urls.
Even if we apply Hanlon's razor and assume the lemmynsfw admins didn't know they had this option turned on and the devs just snuck it in by default in an update, the fact that they've kept it turned on for days when turning it off would fix the issue for external images makes the ignorance excuse moot.
They know it's on, they want it on, and they've got no intention of telling anyone or asking if we're fine with it.
This destroys any trust we could have had on them, and makes moot any assurance on their part (if they ever made one, which they have not) that this alleged proxy is benign.
Some people demand a lot
Dude, I'm just asking them to apply the obvious fix and stop messing with people's posts.
If you think that's a lot you have a serious case of Stockholm syndrome.
Though, to be fair, given the current massively enshittified state of the internet and the world in general, who doesn't, I guess.
Oh, the original malicious intent is evidently on the devs part. They perpetrated this shit and tried to hide it under a stupid “think of the children” blanket.
The lemmynsfw admins did keep this malicious setting on, though, without telling their users, and are persisting on keeping it on despite evidence that it's been causing their instance to be unusable for days (to the point that I very much doubt it'll ever recover).
Hanlon's razor might have applied when this started happening. Maybe they just didn't know they had turned this shit on.
Them persisting on keeping it on when it's clearly harming the instance, though, is making it look more and more likely to be a combination of incompetence and maliciousness instead of just ignorance (and, let's be fair, also incompetence).
And, obviously, their insistence on keeping it on has irrevocably destroyed any trust the users could place on them, which for an instance based on trust (people are supposed to post their own extremely personal pictures here, after all) doesn't bode well at all for the future of the instance.
Call me a rat if you will, but my first instinct is to flee the sinking ship (already made a backup account elsewhere a few weeks ago when it kept randomly crashing) and warn everyone to do the same.
What fucking hard work?
They're just waiting for a response from cloudflare that almost certainly will never come, when they could fix the issue by simply removing the proxy.
You can check it for yourself, look at the URL of any random external image they're serving, https://lemmynsfw.com/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F301480eb-7622-41f3-a66a-a868c3544b90.jpeg, for instance.
Opening that will give you an error instead of an image, because cloudflare is being cloudflare and causing the proxy to fail.
Remove the unnecessary proxy part and fix the mangling, however, and it'll work perfectly: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/301480eb-7622-41f3-a66a-a868c3544b90.jpeg.
(The link is just some random image from the front page, irrelevant but harmless.)
This could and should have been fixed days ago, and would never have happened if they hadn't tried to hijack the urls in the first place!
(Well, it might still have happened with local images, but at least external ones would still work, instead of the whole instance being unusable.)
That is not the issue
It's the underlying cause of the issue. (Well, that and dealing with cloudflare.)
we are having issues with our cloudflare account
Yes (that's what cloudflare appears to be for). Which is causing your stupid proxy to produce this shit instead of an image:
{"code":"object-request-error","msg":"Error performing PUT https://eb21b514652257169b552d5ece7ddfd2.r2.cloudflarestorage.com/lemmynsfw/01/98/22/63/d5/9e/74/c2/94/48/97232eff1bb0.jpeg in 45.917481ms - Server returned non-2xx status code: 403 Forbidden: NotEntitledPlease enable R2 through the Cloudflare Dashboard."}
You'll notice how the first link, which is what your site produces, craps out (because your cloudflare account isn't working properly, as tends to happen with cloudflare, no surprise there), while the second link, which is the original URL reconstructed from your mangling, works perfectly. (I grabbed it from some random post in the front page, the content is irrelevant but harmless).
So keep the fucking original URL instead of hijacking it with some stupid unnecessary proxy and it'll fucking work!
Q.E. fucking D., for fuck's sake! 🤷♂️
Sure, the visible symptom of the issue is cloudflare blocking the image proxy, probably with good reason, since the explanation is absurd (except for the deanonymization part, which is just schizophrenically paranoid; no one cares enough about who's looking at some random image to waste their time setting that up), but the unnecessary and nonconsensual meddling with the urls is the root cause.
We're talking Lemmy here. As great as federation is, small self hosted instance servers will always provide less performance and get overloaded faster than whatever CDN the site the user is linking to is using, so that argument is evidently fallacious.
(Plus, the option to host the image on the instance server has always been there: just download the fucking image from wherever you found it and upload it to the fucking instance. If anything, what this does is take away that choice from the user, leaving us with the “choice” to upload the image... or have it silently uploaded for us anyway.)
Let's be serious, the only reasonable motive behind this (especially when you take into account the devs' notorious ideology) is to be able to better control what the users post.
The deanonymization bit falls by its own weight, since, sure, the original hoster can't see who's loading the image (not that they ever cared to to start with), but now the instance admins (and / or the devs) can. Nothing is ever anonymous in the cloud, for fucks sake. Again, this is just taking away the choice of who to trust, and making lemmy look like the most untrustworthy option in the process.
The most important part, though, is that by highjacking the image hosting without the user's knowledge (and against the user's will, since, again, we could always choose to host the image on the instance, and this applies specifically to the case where the user did not intend to host it here), the instance (and / or the devs) gets control over what image gets actually served.
Enshittification happens. Every single image in the cloud will, sooner or later, be replaced with an ad. That's as certain as the third law of thermodynamics. When you link to a cloud hosted image, you're (mis)placing your trust on the hoster to keep serving that version of the image for the foreseeable future. Maybe I trust the lemmy instance more than the original site, in which case I'll upload the image. Maybe I trust the site more, in which case I'll link it. Maybe I trust neither, and I'll self-host the image, and link it (which is almost certainly the best option for people posting images of themselves, as is the main intended case for lemmynsfw).
But those two later options are now gone. Stolen from us, the users. And, obviously, I (and hopefully most other users) no longer trust the instance, or lemmy. Now the instance (and / or the devs) always has the option to change the image, instead of only when we misplaced our trust on them.
Plus, as the current kerfuffle so evidently shows, it adds a completely unnecessary extra point of failure.
The images would work perfectly if they weren't being shoveled through a hostile proxy no one asked for which is being blocked by cloudflare, probably with good reason.
The lemmynsfw admins could trivially solve the issue for newly linked images by disabling this stupid malicious option (already uploaded ones would probably require fixing the mangled urls at the database level, which is the least that they deserve for having enabled it in the first place), but they're not, they're trying to get cloudflare to fix it, a well known sisyphean task, i.e., an evident waste of everyone's time.
But they're not, so they clearly want to keep the proxy, the very root of the problem.
The whole thing is therefore not only malicious, but profoundly stupid, and depressing.
Just like good old reddit. 🤢
The problem seems to be that for some reason you're messing with image urls and adding https://lemmynsfw.com/api/v3/image_proxy in front of them for some nefarious reason, which obviously prevents them from working.
Just stop messing with people's posts and everything will work fine.
There's clearly something both extremely ill intentioned and extremely incompetent happening here.
This is precisely the kind of profoundly stupid meddling I left reddit for.
Time to look for a new instance or quit lemmy altogether, I guess.
It was... somewhat almost okayish while it lasted.
Ah, yeah, microsoft, the other one of the first three companies that'll try to do this.
(They're already messing with windows and 365, also paid products, so they'll end up messing with azure too sooner rather than later.)
Sure, and the EU will probably fine them into not doing it here, if we haven't kicked them out and replaced them with something local yet.
The rest of the world will probably be screwed, though.
But no, seriously, I do envy your faith in humanity.
Treasure it. It won't last, tragically.