Linux-Is-Best

Hi,
those are SVG images, which are text and compressed via HTTP Gzip. 🙂
If you mean the uploaded images - good suggestion.
 
Regards,
Thomas

If lazy load is enable, why not lazy load profile pictures on IPS 4.5?
On some pages there are many profile pictures with big sized images.

Uploads have been redesigned for 4.6 to address this quirk which can happen with longer filenames.

I hear ya. I documented your suggestion and will continue to keep an eye on things to see whether your idea gains more momentum 🙂

You make a lot of points. Google could very well continue to be the black hole that gobbles up all of the surrounding Internet stardust. However, just like the mysteries of space, we don't know what's going to happen. The what if game is dangerous. 
There are many things we can focus our attention on that is in our control, like the growth of Invision Community and finding our niche place on the worldwide web despite the Google juggernaut stomping its way into our existence. 
All that to say Invision Community does have its sights set on developing video because we understand the importance of community owners and publishers having more control over their own content and not be at the mercy of the Internet empires. 🙏 
Regarding the American comment. I can understand your frustration, but can we all agree to please keep comments like that to ourselves. It'd be greatly appreciated 🙂

If that is indeed the case, there's an option in YouTube to download your own video. 🙂

The YouTube embeds come from YouTube themselves. It's not a third party dependency.

Then provide your users with permissions to edit the content and to upload videos. Then they can go edit their content, remove the YouTube embeds and upload their original source videos to your site?

I will be candid with you and straightforward.
YES, anything you add to your website, embed on your website, or enable onto your website can and will further allow tracking and data collection.  Even your users, hotlinking a harmless photo, can trigger further monitoring and data collection.
Yes, 3rd parties will collect your information and all your users too.  Suppose you are using Google login and Google Analytics (for example). In that case, Google will include several tracking cookies well beyond your website's interactions.  Facebook login will add their own cookies to track your users for a month or more. Long after they sign off your site and logout off Facebook, assuming they do not clear their browser history. Do you plan to have advertisements on your website? More tracking there too.
And I am only covering the cookies aspect on a desktop or laptop.  Within a month's time (if not less), your name, address, phone number, e-mail address, where you shop, what you like to browse, and much, much more are now out there.  Suppose your user is using a mobile device such as a cellular phone or tablet. In that case, they're even deep into the spider's web (metaphorically speaking).
But I digress.  
YES, anything you add to your website, embed on your website, or enable onto your website can and will further allow tracking and data collection.  Even your users, hotlinking a harmless photo, can tricker further monitoring and data collection.
Invision has provided an excellent example within their own privacy policy of how to word such a document.  https://invisioncommunity.com/legal/privacy/
 
Edit:  I see you have updated your post. Originally you had worded this as more of a question.
I think you did an excellent job wording this.

The classic Windows Photo Viewer in Windows 10 supports WebP. This means that you can open WebP photos with Windows Photo Viewer without installing any codec or plugin. Right-click on the WebP picture file, click Open with, and then select Windows Photo Viewer to open the WebP image with Windows Photo Viewer.  However, the catch is that Windows Photo Viewer has been turned off by default. You need to enable it.  Doing that is pretty easy.  Open Notepad and save this as PhotoViewer.reg (be sure not to save it as a text document). Right click the reg file and select, Merge.   Then find a WebP photo of your choice, right click, and open it with Windows Photo Viewer.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.jpg] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.jpeg] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.gif] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.png] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.bmp] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.tiff] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff" ; Change Extension's File Type [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.ico] @="PhotoViewer.FileAssoc.Tiff"  

Fair point. Although I cannot test it since I no longer use Windows, I imagine Microsoft Edge could open a WebP without a reg edit. But I digress. Your point is valid.

Fair point. Although I cannot test it since I no longer use Windows, I imagine Microsoft Edge could open a WebP without a reg edit. But I digress. Your point is valid.

Anything that requires doing registry edits means it's not something that's accessible to the common user is my point.
Until it just works out of the box, without needing you to manually enable anything, it's still a problem, and why you should work to avoid having users download files in WebP format to begin with.
Me personally, I use Directory Opus as a drop-in replacement for Windows Explorer, which has its own photo viewer that is vastly superior to Windows', so the issue doesn't apply to me personally, I'm just thinking in regards to the average end user.
This is not at all an argument against supporting WebP as an uploadable image format, just an observation.

1. Webp is not a niche image format anymore. Full stop.  While I could understand that argument in 2015,  webp is now almost universally supported by all browsers: 
https://caniuse.com/?search=webp
2. The grand irony - or perverse absurdity - is that my own website delivers images as webp via my Cloudflare.  I literally have users who have downloaded my site's images, but can't upload them back to my site! That comes across as distinctly discrepant.  

Thank you, I will look into a VPS. 😀 No one is going to wait 5 minutes to upload pictures. The good thing is the website is only 3 days old.

Hello @Odiss
Presuming you can confirm you are not experiencing any connection issues with your internet service provider (ISP), I would indeed assume this sounds like a hosting issue.  Hawk Host is primarily a shared hosting provider, and many shared hosting providers oversell their resources. They (shared hosts in general) can usually do this successfully because the resources they promise will likely never be used to their maximum potential by most people.  Using a "resell account" still means you are on the same principle. You only happen to have a few extra features that a standard shared account would not have, and it does not mean you have dedicated resources that a VPS (virtual private server) would provide.

More simply, for each login method:
Enabled [ x ] Yes [   ] No Allow new registrations [   ] Yes [ x ] No Allow login [ x ] Yes [   ] No

I hear you. My apologies for not completely digesting your comment before responding. 
So in your example, your forum could theoretically implement Facebook as the only means to creating an account because they have the strictest onboarding process? Is that right? 
I do agree in particular with this: "I have always believed that if something can be abused, it ultimately will be abused, and if there is a will, there is always a way." 
If someone wants to abuse something, they'll stop at nothing. But putting roadblocks in front of them is a good way to go on the offense. 

Another marketplace app you might want to browse through the feature list to see if it might meet you needs:
Chat Application - Applications and Plugins - Invision Community

It is extra-odd that desktop is doing HTTP 2 and mobile is not. I dunno 🤷‍♂️

PNG works fine on the web for a limited number of use cases like logos and other graphics. It was always bad for regular web content like pictures with a lot of information in them. Either huge files (PNG24) or very lossy (PNG8)—especially when processed through the regular web image libraries, which don’t do much optimization. So yeah, going from PNG to WebP will make a huge difference — but only in this very specific scenario of yours. 
One problem with WebP is that a cross-browser support only came very recently with Apple’s Big Sur OS. Before that and without a fallback solution in place, a WebP image would not render at all on millions of Apple devices (or very old Windows machines) and that continues to be the case for some time, since of course not everyone uses the latest operating system.
When you weigh the pros (slightly smaller with slightly better image quality) and cons (might not show at all), the situation is only shifting slowly to the pro side. 
I agree with Joel by the way: the most important fix would be to allow WebP uploads—even if the delivery remains in a legacy format. 

I cannot presume to speak for everyone, but it has been my personal experience whenever seeking out photos to share; all the website's I pull from as a casual user are already using WEBP. That is to say, my members, when posting images, are already frustrated that all the cool photos they wish to share seem to be incompatible with the site. To put that into context, imagine visiting a forum that was incompatible with JPEG. At this point, general web compliance and practiced user engagement should be enough to justify adaptation, in my opinion.
From a technical standing point, I recently updated a static website, which was heavily image-related. One of the last modification was converting my PNG's to WEBP. I noticed a full 4-second speed difference as a notable improvement. 

I was humbly going to suggest that disabling the generic signup was potentially a bad idea. I was going to argue that further incorporating social media as the default requirement to join only further empowers people to use them.  But the more I thought about your concept, the more I could see a potential advantage.
First, it is not too far of a stretch to assume most people today already use Google, Twitter, Facebook, and alike. There is no helping it. Second, one of the biggest drawbacks to forums, especially small communities, is not having the human resources and infrastructure to root out many of the spammers and bots that social media does.  However, by disabling the general e-mail and requiring social media to join your community, you better ensure interested people join, as social media, at least in theory, have already rooted out the fifth.
Additionally, the more I think about your proposed concept, it could be a further deterrent when banning undesirables. Right now, if I ban someone, they can easily pick up a disposable e-mail and hop right back on. However, for example, for places such as Facebook, I need a verified e-mail, verified phone number, and upload a clear photo just to be validated. Banning a Facebook log-in can go along way in keeping more difficult people off your community when a simple e-mail is no longer an option.
Your proposal has caused me to think differently. I like it. 👍