Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
Wait, I'm simply pasting them into my comment. Why should I use a dedicated image holster?
Hosting the images directly on the lemmy/kbin instance creates imo unnecessary traffic to the servers. I don't know if admins can disable selfhosting images, but considering the low-powered machines almost every instance is currently hosted on, I would assume it would be in everyones self-interest to outsource image hosting (at least for now).
Postimages already has official plugins for several forum softwares. I am sure one of them could be tweaked for use in Kbin and Lemmy instances. And postimages themselves might help in this, if contacted.
To offload the storage requirements of the instance you're posting in. If everyone starts uploading images directly in the comment, the server HDD/SDD will be overloaded. Consider using a third party service and posting the link from there instead!
Thats kinda the point of the feature though.. To be used. If its a performance issue, then it should be turned off. In the end, someone has to host the content.
Agreed, that decision should not be left up to the users. It's the server maintainers who know best whether they can afford the storage space. If not, they should limit the ability to store too much data, by whatever means they find relevant, e.g. by limiting maximum post size.
i changed the topic as a general imgur alternatives post, since i could just use the kbin interface to upload images in comments... kbin is miles ahead of reddit with that feature LOL
- you can upload the image directly when creating a post
- picoshare (selfhosted) might be a good option
I host my own images on my server using nginx to serve them from /var/www/images. You can see an example here: https://images.nunosempere.com/blog/2023/02/19/bayesian-adjustment-to-rethink-priorities-welfare-range-estimates/ignore-the-prior.png
The nginx configuration I'm using is
server {
root /var/www/images;
index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;
server_name images.nunosempere.com;
location / {
# First attempt to serve request as file, then
# as directory, then fall back to displaying a 404.
try_files $uri $uri/ =404;
}
listen [::]:443 ssl ipv6only=on; # managed by Certbot
listen 443 ssl; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/images.nunosempere.com/fullchain.pem; # managed by Certbot
ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/images.nunosempere.com/privkey.pem; # managed by Certbot
include /etc/letsencrypt/options-ssl-nginx.conf; # managed by Certbot
ssl_dhparam /etc/letsencrypt/ssl-dhparams.pem; # managed by Certbot
}
server {
if ($host = images.nunosempere.com) {
return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
} # managed by Certbot
listen 80;
listen [::]:80;
server_name images.nunosempere.com;
return 404; # managed by Certbot
}
Discord. You can get the links for images and videos posted in it, and they work outside their original site.
Discord is the worst option in terms of privacy, and since this is the privacy guides community, I am thinking that should be an important criteria to consider.
I didn't know you could do this. I cross post a lot into my discord servers, so this might work.
It's not revealing any information about your discord server by doing so, right?
I run my own file host: kimiga.aishitei.ru. Files get uploaded from clipboard using ShareX. This allows me to have control over my own files, how long they last or if they should last forever, and I'm not dependent on a benevolent developer preventing my links from rotting 8 years from now when they close down their host due to it costing them too much or simply because they got bored of being a sysadmin/dealing with issues (or users) of their site.
I used to donate to pomf.se and used that as the image host because I was a supporter of the sysadmin - but it eventually grew too large and had to shut down. Then a bunch of pomf.se clones popped up and I used one of those - can't remember which one but then that one shut down too after only a year. That's when I decided to set up my own host.
I don't allow other users on the site because I don't feel like having to deal with what users upload, DMCA requests, morally gray areas, etc.
.ru domains are sometimes blocked so my backup is catbox.moe
An imgur alternative should be on privacyguides.org if we ever find one that follows the "privacy guides way"
Lensdump seems good. And it has an option to strip exif data when you upload, which is nice.
I just signed up for PixelFed but haven't uploaded anything as of yet.
Yo this is awesome! Is there a way to get ShareX to upload to it?
is the social aspect of pixelfed required? meaning, could I just upload screenshots and images for threads like this and not have to deal with comments, likes, and followers? I just want to link to images.
It looks like the Fediverse analog of Instagram. Imgur allows anonymous uploads, so you can upload throwaway junk (e.g., memes) and not care. It doesn't look like you can do that with Pixelfed, anymore than you could have done that with Instagram.
curious about this too
I haven't a clue. I need to go set up my profile and see how it all works.
pixelfed is very interesting! fits the free/libre aspect i was looking for! added it in my bookmarks
I actually just googled to make sure bookbark wasn't some new service I just hadn't heard of yet...
my bad! LOL
It's also a fedi software, so pixelfed accounts show up in the microblog tab here on kbin if they are federated.
New to these fedi sites, but isn't there a way to have one login to login across all of them?
No, but you can interact with other "platforms" while been logged in on your home instance(platform)
Thanks! Imgur doesn't play well with my vpn, and I'm not able to upload photos directly (in the vegetarian magazine, at least). I think PixelFed might be a good workaround for me.
i use https://imgbox.com/
Easy to use, easy to remember, privacy friendly, it's great
Thanks for the recommendation. Will give it a shot
I generally use catbox.moe
I only just found out about catbox.moe and i love it, it really adds to the "old internet" vibes of this place.
I have for long used postimages.org whenever I needed one. But imgbb.com is also an equally good option.
postimages.org
does pi remove exif?
So lemmy.world lets you just copypaste images directly from your snipping tool and hosts them on lemmy.world/pictrs
Kbin sadly does not do this, no idea if other lemmy instances do this
AFAIK this is for all instances but it'll be better to host images in a dedicated service to not overload lemmy servers
It's understandable. Image hosting bloats costs quite a bit. It also introduces new issues with the law as the server admin can't allow illegal pictures on it. Offloading that onto a separate image host removes both issues with only minor downsides.
I'd much rather kbin focus on long-term posting stability than worry about image hosting. If it gets big, then we can think about it. Reddit went without image hosting for years though.
I always use the toll the website provides itself
I use imgbb.com almost exclusively. I really like it. It's fast, easy and works well for bulk uploads. It also has a fast drag and drop on the homepage so I can just type "im" on the url bar, press enter, drag and drop like 20 images or just Ctrl V, press upload and copy the urls. No overhead at all.
the postimage.org @tarki posted looks sharp! is it open source? can't see any links to a repo...
I'm quite new here, didn't know i could just use the menu to upload images in comments LOL that is more conveniant than reddit replies for sure
I am curious here, what is wrong with continuing to use Imgur?
You just need a free account and you can keep posting stuff like before, minus the porn.
I already get that Imgur just deciding to nuke all of its old content for shits and giggles is not a widely popular move and so is the NSFW ban.
So for my part I don’t have a gigantic issue with Imgur as a service, but I do have an issue with how bloated the website has become and how they’ve completely degraded the experience on mobile. In general I’m not interested in using an image uploading site like Imgur as social media, so everything but image uploading is overhead for me.
On mobile, Imgur is extremely strict about the experience and “optimization”; direct image links will redirect you to the post instead, and the posts themselves are extremely compressed, which makes images with smaller text basically unreadable, on top of everything else just looking like shit.
My usecase for image hosting is to share with friends, and not have to really worry about looking back at previous images, so I personally rent a server for $3/m (and a domain for like $15/y) and use it to host any files I want to upload. That way I don’t have to worry about third parties screwing with the presentation of my images in ways I don’t want them to.
It's probably a good idea to always have image host alternatives in place so that we don't get a tinybb issue in 5 years...or less
I'm more into "free/libre and open source" services lately.. just curious to find new alternatives
Drew DeVault wrote a blog post back in 2014 that kind of covers it. Imgur seems to have broke the cycle but that doesn't mean they haven't gone to shit. They've just somehow avoided collapsing underneath themselves as they continue the enshittification of Imgur.
I am fundamentally opposed to nearly all forms of advertising at an ideological level and go to great lengths to avoid it in as many of its insidious forms as possible. So that is where Drew and I differ. The only form of advertising I appreciate are extremely dry infomercials (no not the for-TV kind) and authentic word of mouth (not to be confused with "native" advertising or sponsors). Ads are a net negative on humanity and in too many ways to list but because the effects go through a layer of indirection - similar to how secondhand smoke is harmful for non-smokers. People are more OK with ads. It took making the public aware of secondhand smoke and the harm that smoking causes - even for non-smokers - before people took a privileged stance against smoking. That same level of awareness and condemnation will never happen with ads because people are OK with getting things "for free" that they otherwise would have to pay for. So they'll willingly turn a blind eye to the harmful effects of advertisements and "put up with them".
Fuck ads.