The people who created imgur sold it to MediaLab. ML had been struggling with bills in general, and they lost a couple lawsuits regarding content. In a completely unrelated move, they banned NSFW content, fired the community moderators and local development teams and replaced them with AI and overseas workers, resulting in unequal rules enforcement and broken infrastructure. Videos wouldn't upload, wouldn't play, or freeze partway through. Uploads would disappear without notice. A barely-nsfw post would be deleted and the user warned, while other more NSFW posts made it to the front page. Etc, etc. In short, there's been a lot of simmering discontent with the platform for a while now.
So, you remember that video/gif of Nazi Richard Spencer that's been circulating for a few years now? Back when that first came out, naturally some people posted it to imgur - and the content teams deleted the posts and warned the users, who promptly posted screenshots of the warnings, causing even more users to upload Richard Spencer getting punched in the face. They got deleted/warned, pretty much just causing a cascade of Nazi-punching content, until literally the entire popular feed was just Nazis getting punched.
Well, later last week, notifications failed on imgur for some reason - no notifications when you got a reply, or your post reached the front page or got an award, or the people you were following posted something - just dead silence. We were patient, but it started to annoy people. A couple people uploaded images complaining about the lack of notifications, only to have their posts deleted or hidden and in a couple cases they got warned. And it's pretty much spiralled exactly like the punching Nazis meme: notifications remained down, posts complaining about it got taken down, posts complaining about MediaLab's censorship got taken down, and then the entire front page became .
Notifications are back on now, though they seem less frequent than normal, and new content is starting to reach the front page but users are still pissed. There have been repeated discussions about moving elsewhere, but no consensus has emerged yet. PixelFed doesn't scratch the same itch, a bunch of people moved to discord but others don't want to, some people just disappeared or stopped posting. And that's where we are, as of this morning.