image hosting and friction

im the type of person to quite enjoy forumsyes i know shocking the guy who pays for a domain for his silly site likes forumsand one thing i keep running into that i find so interesting is how tricky image hosting actually istext is incredibly easy to store and retrieve, but images can be millions of times denser for a single pngthe naive solution of just letting users upload opens the door to losing all of your storageand the number one security rule of Dont let people upload arbritrary files for no reason gets stomped onthe only other option is to rely on external hosts, but that puts all the pains onto the userhosts can be hard to keep up with, forces you to make another account for the good ones, somemight be blocked in certain regions, its just a huge headachewhile its obviously not the LARGEST factor, the difficulty of images is definitely something that confuses and prevents peoplee from getting into forumsthe tricky thing is that people have grown up with social medias nowand…