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Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

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Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#31

Post by sweca »

fragmede wrote: post #28
sweca wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It's been operating for the past 3 years without any ads or third-party trackers, and I don't have plans to shut it down for the forseeable future.

No one ever starts these things with plans to shut them down, the question is how much money do you have for this right now, how much money is it burning per unit of time, and how long will that last if no one pays for a paid plan. I'm not asking you to answer those questions, but pointing out the reality of the economics of the situation. If an image goes viral, can you pay a 10x or 100x hosting bill? For how long?…

These are good questions to ask. Right now, the monetization strategy is profitable.

If an image does go viral, which has happened before on popular Reddit posts that hit the front page, the infrastructure should be able to handle it for a while, and it should not be costly.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#32

Post by loteck »

metadat wrote: post #22

How is it private if you can't self host? (I'm hoping I missed something :)

Privacy and security here are being commingled under the banner of AES encryption at rest, which is apparently disabled by default.

I always wonder, if your marketing pitch involves security features, but those features are off by default, aren't you technically pitching your lack of security?

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#33

Post by metadat »

loteck wrote: post #32
metadat wrote: post #22

How is it private if you can't self host? (I'm hoping I missed something :)

Privacy and security here are being commingled under the banner of AES encryption at rest, which is apparently disabled by default. I always wonder, if your marketing pitch involves security features, but those features are off by default, aren't you technically pitching your lack of security?

And if $company controls the keys.. what happens once funding dries up? Yeah.. nothing personal but we've seen it previously.

In the meantime, OP and Co. could create an open standard for image hosting, and have a lasting impact on the order of S3. Wouldn't that be something?

Here's to hoping.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#36

Post by sweca »

GaiusCoffee wrote: post #35

I have always wondered how "hosting" sites deal with malicious actors, like sharing of copywritten stuff (like movies), xxx stuff or worse (cp). Is there content moderation at the backend of Horizon?

For privacy reasons, there's no scanning. I rely on user reports to determine whether to take content down.

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#37

Post by agersant »

sweca wrote: post #30
agersant wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Some feedback after using it for a few minutes: - When clicking the "+ create" menu, left-clicking whitespace on the page does not close the dropdown - Home page takes very long to list videos (even with a single video). Updates after moving videos/deleting videos/creating folders also feel unresponsive. - On home page or inside folders, videos do not have thumbnails (just a generic camera icon) - While a…

Thanks for upgrading! And sorry that you ran into some speed bumps. 1. Good catch. Will improve on this. 2. I'm not sure what could be causing this. My account with thousands of uploads loads in less than one second. 3. Thumbnails are not supported due to compute and processing considerations, but will investigate this. 4. Good catch. 5. Compression can be compute intensive, but will investigate this further. 6. Will…

Re: 7 I think in the end all the videos did upload successfully, but the client UI stopped reporting progress at some point.

A couple more suggestions:

- Would like a select-all button instead of clicking videos 1 by 1

- An option to switch from grid view to list view could be useful

- Home UI shows 25 items per page but the grid has 3 columns so the last row is never full - which makes it seem like there are no further pages.

- When moving items, the item count in the title of the destination-selection dialog keeps increasing for every move operation. I think items are not deselected after moving?

Re: Show HN: Horizon – Private alternative to Imgur

#38

Post by sweca »

loteck wrote: post #32
metadat wrote: post #22

How is it private if you can't self host? (I'm hoping I missed something :)

Privacy and security here are being commingled under the banner of AES encryption at rest, which is apparently disabled by default. I always wonder, if your marketing pitch involves security features, but those features are off by default, aren't you technically pitching your lack of security?

Encryption at rest is disabled by default because many users do not want to keep track of all of their encryption keys, which are not stored by Horizon when that setting is enabled.

There are also other security features, like end-to-end encryption for pastes, but like mentioned before, not everyone wants to lose the ability to preview their content in the dashboard.

By giving the user a choice, I can cater to both crowds: one that prefers convenience, vs the other which prefers the most security.

Edit: To clarify, all files are already encrypted at rest with a key I control. But with Encryption enabled (capital E to distinguish the feature name), it is encrypted again with a key Horizon won't store.

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