And it's not just known IPs from commercial providers. I rolled my own OpenVPN server on a Digital Ocean droplet. BLOCKED.

They kicked me to the new layout which I abhor, rather not use the site at all. Took me 10-minutes to find the non-obvious place they hid the option to roll it back.

wait am I british o.O

wait it doesn't work for me either

{"code":"download-file-error","msg":"Unable to download image, bad response 429 Too Many Requests"}

Huh. I'm from Baltics, no VPN

My VPN is custom and they block me. How can they tell the traffic is being routed via VPN? I should know this, can't quite remember how that works.

I put it on here because it's one of the communities that posts the most photos and I've seen a few Imgur embeds posted here in the last day or two. Feel free to forward to any other channel.

As for it working for you, yeah I suspect they have some IP ban lists, and it definitely won't cover every VPN, but I don't think it's reasonable to ask someone to use a different VPN to see your post. Not that you were necessarily implying that.

Probably not directly, but we don't know because Imgur has unprofessionally decided to return an incorrect raw JSON error message instead of explaining the block.

There is a message from the ICO noting the block and that it was considering fining them for failing to take user reported age as part of account creation. This is different from the OSA age verification

No, it's because imgur has refused to conduct the simple 'are you over the age of XX' when people create accounts, which is required by law... there's no verification of anything involved. Just a tick the box exercise... they couldn't even be bothered to do that and that's why they're being investigated and are facing massive fines for years of refusal to do what every other site has done for probably 2 decades now... It's got nothing to do with the draconian online safety act that was recently brought in... it's imgur throwing their toys out of the pram and screaming 'LALALALALALALA' we can't hear you now. it will have zero effect on the investigation and fines for their previous failings to follow the law... it's literally cutting of their nose to spite their face.

See the attached article, but yeah pretty much.

Yeah, with my Italian ISP, Imgur doesn't work. We need a better alternative.

For Lemmy I think you can just upload directly, which is what I do. More generally I'm not sure.

There are a million services like this but I doubt many are FOSS as there are significant coats involved in large-scale image hosting.

I don't believe it's FOSS, but Catbox is very simple and allows you to link directly to images/videos that you upload, with no ads and no login required.