Technology

I don't think it's dying. I hope it's a paradigm shift like when it changed from wild west lawless chaos to three or four huge companies running all of it. Maybe we end up with everything replaced by different distributed services. It's going to incredibly annoying when half the search results are dead links or links to reddit but that annoyance can drive innovation.

We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.

Before reddit, imgur, etc got big, the Internet was FULL of dead links. Image links in particular. Small image hosts cleared their storage after a while because, y'know, kinda expensive to host a bunch of content for free.

But you know what? We ran everything. And discovery was hella different. Personal websites, bulletin boards... Clicking links from one place to end up at another, and then you find another link to another website... It was something different entirely. Of course, Digg, StumbleUpon and reddit all were originally just websites where you could share what you'd discovered and other people could comment on it, but reddit ended up becoming THE place to hang out, and then nobody bothered going to all these small websites anymore.

I see the fediverse as being something in-between. The content doesn't all belong to a massive corporation, but it's also still MORE centralized than the Internet of old. We all hang out in a shared, federated space, rather than having a bunch of different spaces. Communities aren't as insular, which is both good and bad - and I guess everyone has different preferences anyway. But while on a big network like the fediverse or reddit, you tend to feel like part of a very big community (unless you subscribe exclusively to tiny communities/subs), on the forums of old, you'd have a small community and most people were fairly active participants, so it really felt like a close-knit community if you know what I mean.

Is this how a recession feels?

I still remember the Photobucket apocalypse back in the day. One day to the next seemed like internet only had "broken link" images.

I'm not sure if it's dying because this constantly happens. Practically all the image hosts I grew up died ages ago (and many of their replacements, too). Dead image links in older forums are more common than working links. I think it's very difficult to create a sustainable image and video host, especially when people want to use it mostly in embedded or direct links, which really limits the ability to monetize.

I think websites hosting their own images is often ideal because:

1. It will reduce how many places link to an image, since where forums and social media are concerned, so that if the host of the image goes down, so does the place that links to it, avoid the quite frustrating issue of dead links (which can clutter search results in an unhelpful way -- search results generally will never be able to find the image without the page that references it, anyway).
2. The forum is best able to monetize. Direct links to images on different hosts can't really be monetized, but if it's the same host, then it's just one, obvious host to pay for (and so far, the Fediverse seems to be getting a sustainable amount of donations -- heck, I've donated $20 to my original host so far myself).
3. It ensures that the users of the image are the ones that feel the pain of hosting. When it's a separate image host, it's removed from you. But if it's your Fediverse instance (or reddit or whatever social media), the sustainability is closer to you and thus you're more likely to donate to help it run or be understanding of things like ads.

That said, the big downsides are inefficiency and tooling. Central hosts meant more efficient caching. Stuff like GIFs in particular are often common memes. I bet the 1000 most common memes are reused by thousands of sites worldwide and thus work great in a CDN (content delivery network -- basically a distributed cache for media files). As well, central sites can build embeddable widgets or stuff like GIF keyboards (e.g., the default Android keyboard, GBoard, has GIF support with I think GIPHY and Discord seems to use Tenor). If every site has to host their own, that's a lot of reinventing the wheel. Common libraries can help, but not to the extent that a managed cloud service can.

As an aside, I wonder if Google and Discord pay for that GIF integration into their products?

I wonder if the internet, possibly the worlds best accomplishment in cooperation, can survive a post-globalist world?

Perhaps it’s the purist expression of the wave in optimism for liberalised trade before it crested and rolled back out to sea.

I'm a bit surprised they lasted this long to he honest. How did they make money? Ads?

My first thought was my NSFW reddit account... If they didn't already kill it with 3rd party apps, I'd be bummed...

Storage is just the loss leader of the internet, really. Companies will take the loss for access to the data.

YouTube is very profitable now. MEGA is probably profitable.

As far as I know, companies like Gfycat make money by selling API access to different apps. Like say in a messaging app likeTelegram or Signal. The easiest way for them to integrate a gif search and send function inside of messages is through API access to Gfycat's servers. Gfycat then charges them for this streamlined integration and access.

That plus selling user data or ads on their website means they will have some revenue. I dont know if its enough to keep them afloat. Since they are shutting down, I'm guessing it didnt pan out so well.

Unfortunately, big tech has been expending millions (edit: more like billions, maybe trillions) in currency and talent to figure out how to make all-you-can-eat video and images turn a profit. Apparently, it just can't happen at a global scale even when it's lousy with ads and personal data collection.

So, get ready to open your wallet. We'll probably see more and more such services moving to paid-for subscriptions. (IMO)