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this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2025
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Lemmy NSFW
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The problem seems to be that for some reason you're messing with image urls and adding https://lemmynsfw.com/api/v3/image_proxy in front of them for some nefarious reason, which obviously prevents them from working.
Just stop messing with people's posts and everything will work fine.
There's clearly something both extremely ill intentioned and extremely incompetent happening here.
This is precisely the kind of profoundly stupid meddling I left reddit for.
Time to look for a new instance or quit lemmy altogether, I guess.
It was... somewhat almost okayish while it lasted.
I'm just going to include a section from the patch notes for Lemmy version 0.19.4.
For the issue at hand, it appears to be related to Cloudflare based on the 403 error message when tying to view an image.
Sure, the visible symptom of the issue is cloudflare blocking the image proxy, probably with good reason, since the explanation is absurd (except for the deanonymization part, which is just schizophrenically paranoid; no one cares enough about who's looking at some random image to waste their time setting that up), but the unnecessary and nonconsensual meddling with the urls is the root cause.
We're talking Lemmy here. As great as federation is, small self hosted instance servers will always provide less performance and get overloaded faster than whatever CDN the site the user is linking to is using, so that argument is evidently fallacious.
(Plus, the option to host the image on the instance server has always been there: just download the fucking image from wherever you found it and upload it to the fucking instance. If anything, what this does is take away that choice from the user, leaving us with the “choice” to upload the image... or have it silently uploaded for us anyway.)
Let's be serious, the only reasonable motive behind this (especially when you take into account the devs' notorious ideology) is to be able to better control what the users post.
The deanonymization bit falls by its own weight, since, sure, the original hoster can't see who's loading the image (not that they ever cared to to start with), but now the instance admins (and / or the devs) can. Nothing is ever anonymous in the cloud, for fucks sake. Again, this is just taking away the choice of who to trust, and making lemmy look like the most untrustworthy option in the process.
The most important part, though, is that by highjacking the image hosting without the user's knowledge (and against the user's will, since, again, we could always choose to host the image on the instance, and this applies specifically to the case where the user did not intend to host it here), the instance (and / or the devs) gets control over what image gets actually served.
Enshittification happens. Every single image in the cloud will, sooner or later, be replaced with an ad. That's as certain as the third law of thermodynamics. When you link to a cloud hosted image, you're (mis)placing your trust on the hoster to keep serving that version of the image for the foreseeable future. Maybe I trust the lemmy instance more than the original site, in which case I'll upload the image. Maybe I trust the site more, in which case I'll link it. Maybe I trust neither, and I'll self-host the image, and link it (which is almost certainly the best option for people posting images of themselves, as is the main intended case for lemmynsfw).
But those two later options are now gone. Stolen from us, the users. And, obviously, I (and hopefully most other users) no longer trust the instance, or lemmy. Now the instance (and / or the devs) always has the option to change the image, instead of only when we misplaced our trust on them.
Plus, as the current kerfuffle so evidently shows, it adds a completely unnecessary extra point of failure.
The images would work perfectly if they weren't being shoveled through a hostile proxy no one asked for which is being blocked by cloudflare, probably with good reason.
The lemmynsfw admins could trivially solve the issue for newly linked images by disabling this stupid malicious option (already uploaded ones would probably require fixing the mangled urls at the database level, which is the least that they deserve for having enabled it in the first place), but they're not, they're trying to get cloudflare to fix it, a well known sisyphean task, i.e., an evident waste of everyone's time.
But they're not, so they clearly want to keep the proxy, the very root of the problem.
The whole thing is therefore not only malicious, but profoundly stupid, and depressing.
Just like good old reddit. 🤢
That is not the issue, we are having issues with our cloudflare account and our S3 bucket, we are in contact with support and working on a fix. You are making wild assumptions.
It must be hard to deal with these kind of paranoid nutcases, thanks for your hard work.
What fucking hard work?
They're just waiting for a response from cloudflare that almost certainly will never come, when they could fix the issue by simply removing the proxy.
You can check it for yourself, look at the URL of any random external image they're serving, https://lemmynsfw.com/api/v3/image_proxy?url=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.world%2Fpictrs%2Fimage%2F301480eb-7622-41f3-a66a-a868c3544b90.jpeg, for instance.
Opening that will give you an error instead of an image, because cloudflare is being cloudflare and causing the proxy to fail.
Remove the unnecessary proxy part and fix the mangling, however, and it'll work perfectly: https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/301480eb-7622-41f3-a66a-a868c3544b90.jpeg.
(The link is just some random image from the front page, irrelevant but harmless.)
This could and should have been fixed days ago, and would never have happened if they hadn't tried to hijack the urls in the first place!
(Well, it might still have happened with local images, but at least external ones would still work, instead of the whole instance being unusable.)
I think the part that makes your posts seem hostile is that you either know and haven't stated, or are assuming, that this is an intentional behavior on the part of lemmynsfw.
Was this behavior added to Lemmy's master codebase, or is there evidence lemmynsfw's admins customized the code to add a Cloudflare proxy for images? Either way, it doesn't seem like lemmynsfw is acting in bad faith.
I get that there's a larger Reddit / enshittification narrative you're viewing this through, but if you want them to not do that thing - use the URL-cloud-ifier - you'd be much more persuasive and probably get a more constructive reply if you just explained why it's a bad thing and asked them not to do it.
Oh, the original malicious intent is evidently on the devs part. They perpetrated this shit and tried to hide it under a stupid “think of the children” blanket.
The lemmynsfw admins did keep this malicious setting on, though, without telling their users, and are persisting on keeping it on despite evidence that it's been causing their instance to be unusable for days (to the point that I very much doubt it'll ever recover).
Hanlon's razor might have applied when this started happening. Maybe they just didn't know they had turned this shit on.
Them persisting on keeping it on when it's clearly harming the instance, though, is making it look more and more likely to be a combination of incompetence and maliciousness instead of just ignorance (and, let's be fair, also incompetence).
And, obviously, their insistence on keeping it on has irrevocably destroyed any trust the users could place on them, which for an instance based on trust (people are supposed to post their own extremely personal pictures here, after all) doesn't bode well at all for the future of the instance.
Call me a rat if you will, but my first instinct is to flee the sinking ship (already made a backup account elsewhere a few weeks ago when it kept randomly crashing) and warn everyone to do the same.
Some people demand a lot. I think most of us are happy just knowing whats going on.
Any way thanks!
Dude, I'm just asking them to apply the obvious fix and stop messing with people's posts.
If you think that's a lot you have a serious case of Stockholm syndrome.
Though, to be fair, given the current massively enshittified state of the internet and the world in general, who doesn't, I guess.
If it's so obvious, feel free to make your own instance and run it how you want
I don't care enough about the fediverse to waste my time on that, and if I did I'd probably go with piefed anyway.
In any case, as I said in another post you can trivially check for yourself how removing the proxy fixes the issue (in short, grab the url from any image posted in the frontpage or wherever, remove the proxy bits and fix the encoding, and it'll work without any issues).
Yet you care enough to type multiple college length comments just about your paranoia. Either do something about your bitching or shut up already.
Can we not attack people offering constructive criticism? I get they didn't offer a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down, but I value dissent even if you don't.
Paragraphs are easier than hosting an entire instance and it's weird you don't realize that or are hand-waving it to serve your personal attack.
I work in software and manage hosted services myself, for personal and professional purposes. Once set up, it's pretty easy. It's once an issue like this arises that it can become a bit of a nightmare. What I'm going on about is the dude putting in well over an hour, at least, of typing about his little conspiracy theory. Could something sketchy be happening? Yes. Is it likely? No.
Do you realize the first half of your comment equates to, "It's easy for an expert like myself, so it's easy for everyone?"
I would be shocked if it took them "well over an hour" to write that comment. I'd bet fifteen minutes or so.
That's not the only comment he left on this post.. And that's not how my comment is meant to be read. More a "Once you get it set up, it runs itself." doesn't matter your skill level. I mention my experience to give credit to my perspective, since I've been a dumbass at this stuff before, so know how it is.
It's the underlying cause of the issue. (Well, that and dealing with cloudflare.)
Yes (that's what cloudflare appears to be for). Which is causing your stupid proxy to produce this shit instead of an image:
You'll notice how the first link, which is what your site produces, craps out (because your cloudflare account isn't working properly, as tends to happen with cloudflare, no surprise there), while the second link, which is the original URL reconstructed from your mangling, works perfectly. (I grabbed it from some random post in the front page, the content is irrelevant but harmless).
So keep the fucking original URL instead of hijacking it with some stupid unnecessary proxy and it'll fucking work!
Q.E. fucking D., for fuck's sake! 🤷♂️