Indentured servants. Exactly how oligarchs prefer their workforce.

You can avoid it completely right now by simply joining one of the less crowded instances instead.

I definitely agree with that, and I really don’t have a good answer on how to create a financially secure image hosting service. But I do think that criticism of how they are approaching it on imgur at the moment is legitimate. In particular their intention of deleting pictures uploaded before the deadline by non-account users. This will only add to the unfathomable amount of link rot going on atm all over the internet.

Problem is that it is not just on the subject of cheating on your spouse that this is possible, any photographic evidence of a person committing an actual crime will also become worthless.

imgur is also in a downward spiral of entshittification though. No uploading without an account, and all old images uploaded by people with no accounts are going to get deleted.

They want to be a social media site now, not an image hosting site.