Imgur Geo-Blocked the UK, So I Geo-Unblocked My Network

Summary

Imgur decided to block UK users. Honestly? I don’t really care that much. I haven’t actively browsed the site in years. But it used to be everywhere. Back when Reddit embedded everything on Imgur, maybe fifteen years ago, it was genuinely useful. Then Reddit built their own image hosting, Discord did the same, and Imgur slowly faded into the background.Except it never fully disappeared. And since the block, I keep stumbling across Imgur links that just show “unavailable.” It’s mildly infuriating.The Minecraft shader problem#Here’s a concrete example. I was playing Minecraft with some work colleagues and wanted to try different shaders. Most shader pages embed preview images hosted on Imgur. So I’d click through shader after shader, and every single preview was just gone. I couldn’t see what any of them looked like without the images.This kind of thing happens constantly now. Old forum posts, Reddit threads, documentation pages, random project READMEs. Imgur links are still scattered across the internet, and in the UK, they’re all broken.Why I didn’t just install a VPN#The obvious solution is to use a VPN. Change your location, problem solved. But I have a few issues with that approach.First, I just upgraded to 2.5 Gbps internet and I don’t want to route all my traffic through a VPN and take the speed hit. I have this bandwidth for a reason.Second, even if I installed a VPN on my main machine, what about my phone? My laptop? My desktop? Every device would need the VPN running, and I’d have to remember to connect it before browsing. It’s messy.I wanted something cleaner: a solution that works for every device on my network, automatically, without any client-side configuration.The network-level approach#I already run a homelab with Traefik as my reverse proxy, Pi-hole for DNS, and everything declaratively configured with NixOS. If you’ve read my previous post on Docker containers with secrets, you’ll recognise the pattern.The idea was simple: intercept all requests to ...