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 We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.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.
This is a privacy risk because Lemmy doesn't proxy external media (or cache remote media like Mastodon). It's also better for longevity, if an external image host the image is gone.
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.
- you can upload the image directly when creating a post
- picoshare (selfhosted) might be a good option
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?
Lensdump seems good. And it has an option to strip exif data when you upload, which is nice.
I recommend Lensdump too. It also has an auto-delete feature, which is nice. It doesn't allow for anonymous/guest downloads, but that's not exactly a bad thing.
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
}
I have for long used postimages.org whenever I needed one. But imgbb.com is also an equally good option.
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 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
This is the way.
I just discovered PrivacyGuides and this is probably a newbie question, but is there a reason you use a .ru domain over others?
An imgur alternative should be on privacyguides.org if we ever find one that follows the "privacy guides way"
I just signed up for PixelFed but haven't uploaded anything as of yet.
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.
I haven't a clue. I need to go set up my profile and see how it all works.
Yo this is awesome! Is there a way to get ShareX to upload to it?
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.
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
postimages.org
does pi remove exif?
I always use the toll the website provides itself
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.
kbinners can upload pictures, we just can't Ctrl+V images as a quick way of uploading
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.
I always upload images directly to whatever I'm using, if it doesn't support images I just describe the image. For looking at things on Imgur, I have LibRedirect configured to redirect to rimgo.
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 run an instance of Xbackbone on my server, and it works quite well. It can export you a ShareX config for Windows, and on Linux/macOS it can export either a shell script (which I use with KSnip) or a Screencloud plugin to use with it.