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Comment by domoritz | Hacker News Reader

Off topic but how do you put images on ipfs and what’s the advantage over e.g. Imgur?

Cloudflare are kindly hosting [1] a free HTTP gateway for the IPFS [2] network. So I can host an image myself on a server with IPFS, and Cloudflare will cache it for me. This is better than Imgur because the latter has been redirecting users to annoying "social" pages with ads instead of showing them the actual image, at least in some cases. I also can't be sure whether Imgur recompresses your uploads or not - I assume they usually do.

It's also more generally useful because I can host other files too, not just images.

[1] https://www.cloudflare.com/distributed-web-gateway/

[2] https://ipfs.io/

Is hosting the image yourself, on like a $5 Digital Ocean Droplet and a $10 personal domain, out of the question? This would seem to be the ideal situation in terms of simple, decentralized file hosting solution. What are the downsides of this approach?

(I can imagine a server package that can modify index.html sub-resource URLs depending on current server load, preferring private, locally hosted sub-resources but willing to use 3rd party solutions like Cloudflare, too, if required by a black swan event.)

Out of the question? No. As convenient as running one command on a desktop computer? Also no.

> the ideal situation in terms of simple, decentralized file hosting solution

Not sure what you mean by "decentralized" if you are in fact hosting it yourself.

> What are the downsides of this approach?

Well, for the casual person it has the obvious downside that you have to have your own VPS. Most people don't have those. Even if you do, IPFS has a couple of advantages: you can host images anonymously, and anyone anywhere in the world can "pin" the image to make sure it stays live. If you're using a server and you forget to pay DO your $5 one month, all your images go poof into the ether.

There's also https://imgz.org, that doesn't have annoying social stuff (I made it specifically for that!).

I keep getting 524 errors when trying to access files I uploaded. What am I doing wrong?

Not OP, and I haven't done it myself yet, but it makes a lot of sense. It's basically free image hosting if you can get the file cached by Cloudflare.

Imgur these days is slow and riddled by ads. A page show will sometimes load many times the image size in Javascript, stylesheets and images. It also doesn't allow the user to just view the raw image, going as far as redirecting requests to the raw image to a web page if you directly access the URL.

The only downside I see is that the URL is less user friendly without the IPFS toolset installed. Sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

Are these imgur problems a USA thing? Because I literally never had any of the behavior described. Direct image links always go to the image, there is no JS or HTML or anything.

Yep same here. Maybe the issue is about non-direct links, but it could be that imgur changes what it responds with depending on the request. If the url ends with .jpg it can still serve an HTML page.

If you upload and then link to an image on Imgur and the person clicking the link has not run Imgur's javascript yet within $timeperiod, the image will not display. Instead you'll be given javascript to run.

Cloudflare as a gateway is distasteful and this won't last long, but for now at least when you click an ipfs image over cloudflare you get an image and not javascript code.

Why is CF distasteful?

Not OP but I assume because it kind of defets the purpose of IPFS. IPFS is all about links that refer to content and not location, a cloudflare link is now back to a location and when the cf mirror goes down, the link will be broken.

But its also the only way normal users can see the content.

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