Hi Jow Forums

hi Jow Forums
im developing a new image hosting service and i would like to hear your opinion
ive already obtained two four-character domains, including the .tld

the features are as follows:
>duration is configurable upon uploading
>once a link expires, the image will no longer be accessible

aslo, users will be able to register for a api token for free, but give up some anonymity in the process
>this increases the max filesize to 500MB over the default 50MB
>more api functions such as a info about all your images, ability to instantly epire them all at once, etc.
>100 uploads per hour limit per token
>two tokens per IP per month

additionally, to monetize it, i will allow people to pay $1 USD in crypto per year for more perks
>these users will be able to create their own subdomain
>custom filenames upon upload rather than a random alphanumeric string
>every api function access
>5gb limit
>ability to set images to expire up to a year after uploading
>request an archive of all their non-deleted images

it should be noted that i am not intending to make a profit off of this, so do not criticize me for financial reasons or the $1 tier.
lets focus on the technology, what would you like to see added or changed?

i will open source the api ofc.
jk:wq

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>jk:wq
based vim user spotted

Integrate DeepNude app so that your service can poorly render fake nudes of various people.

Why should I use it over any of the already existing image hosting services out there?

Can expiration be set to unlimited? If not, I'd like that as a paid option. There are temporary sharing hosts (i.e. pomf clones) popping up here and there all the time, coming and going, but the only reliable permanent host is imgur and it's fucking garbage - compresses your images to fuck, impossible to use from a phone, etc. Everything else inevitably ends up showing a "whoops, this image doesn't exist uwu" after like 3-4 years.

Obviously I don't expect you do keep the service running literally forever, but if you can guarantee a decade that'd be nice and more than that would be a bonus.

In a similar but not necessarily related vein, the possibility to enter an email address for expiry notifications would be nice. Not a universally desired feature probably, but I can see cases where it would be handy.

anonymity, short domains, very extensive but easy to use api

can't wait to flood your site with cp fren

very solid idea

>Can expiration be set to unlimited?
i have contemplated adding this, but not for larger files. it could be easily abused if someone perhaps uploaded 100 5gb images that would never expire. it is certainly possible though.

>garbage - compresses your images to fuck
my service will store lossless files, no compression. the only change i am doing right now is the filename. in later development i also want to strip metadata, like EXIF stuff that can potentially be used to track people.


>I don't expect you do keep the service running literally forever
the service will be used by me and my friends, so expect it to last for a long time. the way im developing it also allows it to be easily migrated to new domains/hosts so even if something goes wrong the images will still be accessible via api.

>email address for expiry notifications would be nice
expiry notifications as in "your file is expiring in 24 hours" ? right now the api is capable of calling a webhook upon file archival, which could be easily altered to send an email before a file link expires

>100 uploads per hour limit token
>two tokens per IP per month
>500MB limit
>free api tokens
>hosting ~74.4TB per month per IP
I'm interested in how you will store this much data for free.
Or it's ~744TB if you pay 1$ USD every year. Cheapest $/GB is about 0.013 so that'll be roughly $9.7K every year in just storage costs.

>anonymity
that will last around 10 seconds before someone starts using your service as a CP dump. you are one dense cunt. you'll be snitching to cops in no time at all or you are the police.. i'll get to that in a second:
> pay for increased storage
nobody is going to do that, faggot.
> not about money, about the technology
then it's obviously a honey trap for fucking morons, mr police officer. kys as soon as fucking possible.

>I'm interested in how you will store this much data for free.
paid for using cash supplied to whatever 3 letter agency or police department.

so you have cp? im going to have to turn you in to the poeleese

good luck, I'm behind 7 proxies and using incognito mode

we already have ~150TB unused on a server, and most images are under a MB anyway.

im not expecting it to be used at full capacity by multiple users, but it will certainly be able to handle abuse from a few people that are retarded enough to spend time on it.

encrypt the images and therefore the server has no ability to view them, cannot be legally responsible

images are the property of the uploader

>not using wifi
>police can trace your internetwire
I'm sorry user they will just track the cable that leads to you.

>not about money, about the technology

it literally is, we are going to use the service ourselves. it was originally intended to be selfhosted just for us but began working on the api and decided we may aswell make it public for fun

just some cs majors getting development experience, we are paying for it so if we can make money off it why not.

the point was that you guys wouldnt criticize the "business" model because thats not what it is. i wanted to hear your guys opinion on the image hosting concept itself

SEETHING

why are people like this?

>>Can expiration be set to unlimited?
>i have contemplated adding this, but not for larger files. it could be easily abused if someone perhaps uploaded 100 5gb images that would never expire. it is certainly possible though.
Of course. That's why I suggested paid only. Could also add a file limit - it's rare that I ever want to send, show or host an image larger than 10MB, and in the rare cases I do, I usually expect people to just download it right now and I can't think of an occasion when I wanted one hosted for a long time.

>expiry notifications as in "your file is expiring in 24 hours" ?
Yeah. Would be particularly useful if, say, an "indefinite" mode is added which isn't guaranteed unlimited but rather "until it gets evicted based on a variety of criteria". But I can also see myself setting reminders for fixed length files. And of course if you ever end up taking down "unlimited" files I'm sure many uploaders would like to know that.

check
and
mate

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>the point was that you guys wouldnt criticize the "business" model because thats not what it is. i wanted to hear your guys opinion on the image hosting concept itself
Thing is this is VERY lax and even today storage isn't that cheap. $1/year is literally nothing and while I would pay that purely for the convenience of a reliable, trustworthy, anonymous, private and well-made service - if someone wanted to upload a bazillion of 5GB files, then even the free limits on google cloud, onedrive and dropbox wouldn't stack up to this. And those are gigantic gigacorps with vast infrastructures no single person could meaningfully impact, and they continuously monetize all uploaded content by datamining it and you.

If nobody abuses it, great. But why let people abuse it in the first place? "Oh I have a limit of like 75TB/month but only until somebody actually tries studying 75TB/month, at which point I'll implement measures to lower it." Just put sane limits upfront - for instance, add an account quota, so users can still upload a bazillion reasonably sized files or dump their multi-GB archives but not combine the two. Even 100GB per user is likely generous enough for 99.9% of use cases, as long as not too many people take full advantage of it (and this you can't know until you try). For people that want more, they can either find a dedicated archival service rather than trying to abuse an "image host", or if you really wanted you could implement a higher paid tier that will actually cover the costs.

yeah that seems reasonable

for the indefinite mode-- im going to have it where you have to renew it every 365 days, an email will be sent a week before, otherwise you could use the api to query it. if you dont renew, it will be moved to limbo where you will still have a chance to renew it before it gets deleted. files will be deleted based on a formula that selects the largest files that have been accessed the fewest times while in the limbo period. this should be a good balance between disk usage and causing 404s.

tldr if you dont renew indefinite, the largest files get bopped first to optimize disk usage

Oh, that's nice. Unlimited would still have its use as an "upload and forget" service, but with appropriate limits of course.

if we make it exclusively for .png/jpg files-- we could reduce the max size to like 5MB and prevent abuse from doing much damage.

as for infrastructure, we have 18 10TB white label wd drives from our university. based on our current uploading per day among my friends, that will last basically forever. even with consistent uploaders at the max among our group, that storage will last decades.

the 5gb limit is perhaps a bit extreme which is why maybe we are going to add another tier that is user vetted to prevent abuse.. or something to reduce potential for abuse,, idrk what we could do. 5gb images are going to be artificial anyways, maybe we could implement a system to detect artificial images that just repeat bytes to increase file size or something similar.

There's nothing stopping anyone from adding a valid png/jpg/whatever header to any arbitrary binary data. You can't detect that without some advanced analysys to determine if the image is full of noise or somethinc (or human inspection).

I'm not sure about how this would work, but being able to acces it as you would a NAS, so in a file manager, would in my mind be the biggest advantage over others. Probably for paying users with their own sub-domain.
That and long-term storage where you could pay, let's say $1 for 50MB, to have some images stay for 10+ years. Would be a god-send when browsing forums to not find dead links because of expired pictures or hosts, because for $1 50MB should be easily maintainable for 10 years even if you have tk shut the main services down. ($20,000 to maintain 1TB over 10+ years, no biggie)

true, but nobody is autistic enough to legitimately spend time doing such a thing. we will probably just have to have a low filesize limit, say 10mb. could also throttle repeat uploaders, but that would require logging.

although it wouldnt be impossible to just look at the file header hex to see if its PNG, ive seen a picture detection using a neural network on a forum before that can differentiate noise or random binary from a legitimate screenshot or picture.

there are ways around everything, and as long as its not a major exploit we should be fine. but if it just retards trying to upload a lot of bytes idrc, we can work around it or simply ignore it until they expire.

if they have their own subdomain i could easily implement a open directory viewer of some sorts that requires their token to view. should be simple to implement.

thanks for the suggestion

and yeah after reading this thread im thinking i should have a one-time-pay thing where people pay to put files in a "vault" sort of that guarantees their existence for decades. still debating on how to implement it though

I suppose video/audio hosting wouldn't be bad either, aswell as instead of a hard expiration date being able to opt for however long the file can last (might even marginally increase storage live).
However, even the vault might stretch the idea of a simple imagehost too much and adding all of these options might make it too messy, resulting in scared users.
Anyway, I'm curious as to how it'll work out, maybe provide a way to track progress on the host or to find it when it's available.

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the ui is mininmalistic and sexy

the real juice is the API, which only the interested/advanced users will be exposed to

working on the concepts/documentation right now

ill be posting updates as they come here, and a few other forums. but if you are interested i could provide a friends 6cord account

I'll probably see you show up from time to time.
Much luck.

My opinion? You're the hero we need.
All current options suck hard.

thanks, will sweat on this project in my free time for the following weeks. the next post will hopefully include a link, not sure if advertising is allowed on this board tho.

so true, this is the main motivator for hosting myself. everything just sucks. image hosting is so simple, its amazing how many comapnies fuck it up. ill do it myself if nobody else has a brain baka

OP

IPFS is going to rape your asshole in the coming years.

bump
Wish you luck OP