News recently broke out that the popular image hosting platform Imgur decided to self-destruct in a fashion similar to Tumblr, going crazy on NSFW content and doing other foolish changes to make itself more restrictive and annoying to use. It seems to follow the fate of Tinypic which used to be its predecessor long ago and ultimately ended up dead in the ground too. I think it’s clear the time has come for an IPFS based alternative to this type of service!
Of course I know images as any content can be stored on IPFS manually. What I’m wondering is if a user friendly service / interface that provides a similar experience exists: A website anyone can deploy and host mirrors / gateways for, which presents a browse button or drag field where you can upload any file from within the browser, then of course publicly or privately share it with anyone including direct link for forums and similar (would likely be through a gateway URL). It would be nice to have others of its features, like a featured database you can browse with keyword search or the ability to make lists / albums, but that would be highly optional: I’m just interested in anything that ideally works as a Pastebin for text / images / videos / audio / etc even with simple functionality.
As IPFS can be slow and nodes typically don’t store everything forever, I’m of course aware of the price that nothing on it lasts forever unless repeatedly accessed. Even so I’m sure it would be helpful for those of us that need a replacement to Imgur as it triumphantly announces its death, and generally a censorship free service for quick sharing. As an artist I’ve been looking for a gallery where I may store my content safely, such a system may help with that as well granted it can generate a directory I may edit whereas anyone else can browse.