Does the option to add an image via URL not work? I have tried in both Brave and Firefox desktop browsers and the Brave mobile app - clicking the "From URL" or "Upload File" doesn't appear to do anything.
The only thing that does anything from this menu is clicking the filepath to upload a file from local.
Am I missing something?
That part of the UI is not ready yet and it's buggy (uploading from file doesn't show preview).
You can add an link to an image with the image icon in the composer
I dunno, but it seems like this ought to be a pretty high priority, as hosting all the images locally is going to get exponentially more expensive as more people come to kbin... Being able to use a web image host is a much easier option.
Yeah, maybe.
There's currently 414 open issues in the tracker and 61 PRs to review and possibly merge. Pretty sure ernest will get to it eventually, but it's probably worth to remember the project is still in prototype phase and all work being done is purely on voluntary basis.
Another possibility I was thinking about last night is when federated servers obtain local copies of comments that reference images, if the server enables the option to do so, also replicating the image and causing users viewing the comment via that server to use that instance's copy of the image.
That does mean that keeping the original comment text and maybe signature on the image around might be necessary if pubkey signing of comments or something comes into play later -- so it's a design decision that might have some long-running effects.
Given that serving images might be a significant chunk of the bandwidth that kbin instances use, it has implications for where costs lie -- on the instance where the community lives, or on the instance that has the users -- so it might be worth careful consideration.