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Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

haasie.com

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Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#41

Post by celsoazevedo »

rvavruch wrote: post #29
_a9 wrote: post #23

> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host? FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015. - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur - https://tracker.archiveteam.org/im…

My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.

Sites like catbox[.]moe are popular and most months seem to fail to cover all their expenses with donations. And that's using cheap hosting (ovh, hetzner, etc, and no CDN), I imagine that your Fastly bill will be higher than theirs.

For this to work, I think you need to find revenue sources right away and run it as cheaply as possible, otherwise you'll run into problems, creating more link rot in the process.

Anyway, I hope you manage to make it work.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#42

Post by rvavruch »

celsoazevedo wrote: post #41
rvavruch wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.

Sites like catbox[.]moe are popular and most months seem to fail to cover all their expenses with donations. And that's using cheap hosting (ovh, hetzner, etc, and no CDN), I imagine that your Fastly bill will be higher than theirs. For this to work, I think you need to find revenue sources right away and run it as cheaply as possible, otherwise you'll run into problems, creating more link rot in the process. Anyway,…

Thanks, agreed it will be a challenge.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#43

Post by myself248 »

groby_b wrote: post #15
myself248 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sad to me that we went away from everyone just having their personal web space as part of their ISP package. Ditto email. It meant more smaller providers had to play nice and we didn't have a few major companies arbitrarily deciding what to host and what to drop. I don't believe it should be government funded, but I wish there was a protocol that would let my ISP allocate a few GB of resources on my behalf that…

You can't because some people hosted extremely popular files (often starting with p- and ending in -orn) on the few GB that your local ISP gave you. And your local ISP suddenly needed to serve hundreds of terabytes they didn't have in their peering budget. So now you need caps. And enforcement. And exceptions. And suddenly, you have a cloud service provider. And they've invested a ton into making the place nice, and…

Yeah, so we'd need something sort of like bittorrent-with-web-seeds for any file more than a certain size, and maybe some pre-concatenated optimization where the whole page and its assets become a single file under such a system. Maybe IPFS might be a useful layer?

Anyway, "hosting" would mean two things: 1: "I attach my name to this content and it's always locatable as a tag under my name", and 2: "I dedicate some static resources to always host this content, whether or not it's popular enough to also propagate to other nodes in the swarm, I will always seed it".

Then simply having that seed-box allocate a certain amount of its space to each subscriber would be all you'd need.

Succession protocol would have internal uses too; they could say "Hey this subscriber has some really popular content, let's move it to a faster node", and the same primitives would track that move.

I feel like most of these pieces already exist, the trouble is there's no longer an expectation for an ISP to provide hosting to customers, so providing better hosting isn't a differentiating factor. (Not that there's meaningful competition in many places anyway, which may be the root of the problem.)

Which all adds up to people not realizing there is or even could be an alternative to hosting their images on perpetually-unprofitable-and-thus-inevitably-transient services like photobucket, imgur, and their ilk.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#44

Post by rvavruch »

csydas wrote: post #32

Interesting service, but an earnest question about your Terms and Conditions[0]. How closely did you read this? Since I see you used an TOC generator (which was nice for me learn about), I'm just curious how closely you read some of the conditions. I just may be reading the Prohibited[1] section too closely as well as the User Generated Content [2] section, but it seems like your stated goal about protecting the NSFW…

Fair question. I did read the TOCs, and studied the current TOCs of Imgur as well as my hosting company to make sure Haasie's covered the most important aspects.

Imgur atm still allows for NSFW, although presumably this will change. But as it stands the contents of these TOCs are not dissimilar from Imgur's or any other file hosts that allow for NSFW content.

To clarify Haasie is not intended to be a specifically NSFW host - like RedGIF someone here mentioned - but rather to host any legal content, which includes NSFW.

Emphasis here is on legal. The intention behind the TOCs is to specifically prohibit the use of the service for anything illegal or otherwise prohibited by the hosting company. And to state that Haasie will act on any content that is found to be in violation of the TOCs.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#45

Post by rvavruch »

stavros wrote: post #36
_a9 wrote: post #23

> Well done, you’ve defeated link rot Until this site succumbs to the challenges of being a free image host? FWIW ArchiveTeam is grabbing as much as possible so it could eventually show up in the wayback machine. Though what they have now, 47TB, is a drop to the petabytes imgur probably has now. There was an estimated 376 TiB in 2015. - https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Imgur - https://tracker.archiveteam.org/im…

Free image hosts just aren't sustainable, the costs are high and it's fairly hard to make that money back. I made a paid image host a while back ( https://imgz.org ) exactly because of that reason.

Hi, your site came up in my research. Although it wasn't clear if it was an actual service or an art project? Keen to hear more about your experiences.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#46

Post by stavros »

rvavruch wrote: post #45
stavros wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free image hosts just aren't sustainable, the costs are high and it's fairly hard to make that money back. I made a paid image host a while back ( https://imgz.org ) exactly because of that reason.

Hi, your site came up in my research. Although it wasn't clear if it was an actual service or an art project? Keen to hear more about your experiences.

It's both! It's an art project that works very well, which is the best kind of art project.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#47

Post by rvavruch »

not_your_vase wrote: post #35
rvavruch wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! My thinking is to start with donations. There is no such thing as a free service. If people get value from using it to upload anonymously and they want to keep it going, makes sense to donate. In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.

Is there a backup plan? Not saying that relying on donations is impossible, but realistically there is a very small chance that enough donation will flow in continuously. As a sidenote, reddit is (was?) the one of main user of imgur, however https://www.google.com/search?q=%22haasie.com%22+site%3Aredd... yields no results - maybe it is worth to promote it there also.

Your question honestly got me thinking. If everything goes completely sideways there are a number of shuttering options I can think of.

One is to turn off any new uploads, and just serve the existing content, presumably the bandwidth on old content would be much lower - until some sustainable plan can be devised.

Last resort is to approach the ArchiveTeam mentioned here to see if and we could to setup a maintenance service.

To your side note, yes, I want to promote it on Reddit, as soon as I've added a few more features - like donations.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#48

Post by rvavruch »

Sakos wrote: post #21
cantsingh wrote: post #4

Could it be configured so if I go to, for example, https://i.haasie.com/something.png and you haven't already backed up from imgur, you back it up when that URL is hit?

Definitely agree. It also feels like this would be perfect in combination with something like ipfs for a decentralized way to store and access these images.

Agreed. I've played with IPFS before. Very interesting, definitely something to consider for the future of Haasie.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#49

Post by rvavruch »

Thanks for all the questions. It has really gotten me to thinking about how to navigate the future of the project.

I have a question for all of you. My approach is that we are all understand that there is no such thing as a free service, and that for something like this to be long term sustainable donations (or some source of revenue) is crucial. If people get value from the service then it only makes sense to give back to the service to sustain it.

With this in mind, I'm toying with an idea that I would like to get a temperature check from HN on.

How would you react if, when donations are too low, Haasie serves a single image that requests donations to sustain the service in place of the original anonymously uploaded content, until the required donation level is reached? Once there are enough donations normal service is resumed.

Re: Show HN: Avoiding Imgur Link Rot

#50

Post by csydas »

rvavruch wrote: post #44
csydas wrote: post #32

Interesting service, but an earnest question about your Terms and Conditions[0]. How closely did you read this? Since I see you used an TOC generator (which was nice for me learn about), I'm just curious how closely you read some of the conditions. I just may be reading the Prohibited[1] section too closely as well as the User Generated Content [2] section, but it seems like your stated goal about protecting the NSFW…

Fair question. I did read the TOCs, and studied the current TOCs of Imgur as well as my hosting company to make sure Haasie's covered the most important aspects. Imgur atm still allows for NSFW, although presumably this will change. But as it stands the contents of these TOCs are not dissimilar from Imgur's or any other file hosts that allow for NSFW content. To clarify Haasie is not intended to be a specifically NSF…

thanks for the answer :) really, not trying to "gotcha", just was curious if your read of your current TOC was compatible with your goals. I didn't meant to indicate you were exclusively looking for nsfw (but I see how what I wrote implied it), just more a coffee thought while reading this thread :)

good luck on the project!

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