Ability to compose notes with external images (by their url)

[Ai-rin]

Currently the only choice you have is to upload image to Drive.
Allowing external images could potentially reduce the load on Misskey instance, and give users more flexibility.
Pleroma and Friendica support this and I use it often to post pictures directly from Matrix chatroom.
Markdown defines the syntax as ![Alt Text](url)

[Vovanium]

On this feature, remote image availability issues should be taken into account.

• An image can become unavailable due to storage period expiration or manual deletion. This could lead to a note with an image missed in future.
• An image can be available only to registered users, or hotlinking can be forbidden. This lead to a missing image instantly.
  There are several methods to solve:

1. Leave links as-is. Warn an author about potential unavailability. Maybe check availability, by sending a request from the server.
2. Cache images, replacing links with cached ones. Warn if the image is unavailable.
3. Suggest a user to, or automatically load images to the Drive.

[Ai-rin]

If the user can type the syntax, he/she probably knows what he/she is doing. Beginners won't use it anyway. I am not against one-time warning, but other platforms are doing fine without that.

update: post preview (#6751) would combine perfectly with this feature.

[Vovanium]

I warn, because posts with broken images are already an issue across the internet.
This feature can be more convenient for both a writer and a reader. I wish it will be.

[Dehelssey]

I understand the concern on broken image BUT it's still something that can happen in the current way of doing things 👍 if i delete an image from my drive, my post which displayed it will also have broken image

Pretty sure it's not that big a deal, is it ?
Unless you think fediverse posts are meant to live forever^^ i feel like microblogging is mainly ephemeral, by design

[noridev]

I understand the concern on broken image BUT it's still something that can happen in the current way of doing things 👍 if i delete an image from my drive, my post which displayed it will also have broken image

Pretty sure it's not that big a deal, is it ?
Unless you think fediverse posts are meant to live forever^^ i feel like microblogging is mainly ephemeral, by design

Are you saying that removing the image from the drive kept the notes?
When i delete an image from my Misskey drive, the notes using that image are also removed.

[Dehelssey]

Sorry, i thought notes were kept when media were deleted, and assumed notes were displayed with a broken image (i think i saw some placeholder looking like that in misskey's repo)

But like you said, when a media is deleted so are notes using it. It's actually stated by the UI >_< my mistake

[shibaobun]

I'd like to add that this could be a valuable feature for linking to images such as on boorus, or twitter, where if the image is deleted from the booru/twitter, we may also want to not display the image anymore (if the creator decided to remove it), or to avoid accidentally downsizing/compressing the image.
While this may be better discouraged behind a option in the settings, or even just only accessible via the API, I still think that this is a very valuable option to have!

[shibaobun]

I'd also like to add that embedded images in markdown from other servers such as pleroma display. However, shitposter.club is currently having issues, so it doesn't appear at the link, but it's still possible in pleroma
Here's an example of a post on pleroma and it's equivalent one on misskey.
At a minimum, we would want to display these as an ordinary link as a fallback, and hopefully it will be fixed in shitposter.club as well!

[shibaobun]

Also as an aside, when I delete media from my drive that still has posts remaining, the posts still display, just without the attached media anymore. So I think that failures to embed in this ticket aren't very different than what happens when an image is deleted from the drive right now

[Sayamame-beans]

related #93