That's gonna result in a massive amount of dead links. The internet really is dying...
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.
I’m 100% down to go back to Wild West.
The feeling and freedom of playing runescape on the early 2000s unfiltered internet was something I’ve missed. Maybe it’s coming back.
100% agree. I think we were better off with the Wild West. Users were actually in charge, server admins were small operators who didn't have to answer to venture capitalists who wanted to 10x their investment, not everything was data scraped and logged to build advertising profiles on the entire population. Each community set its own rules, you didn't have one guy in California deciding what the AUP would be for millions and then changing it on a whim because some advertiser got pissed off.
While the big companies have created some very cool stuff, and using it is very approachable without any technical knowledge, I would trade it all in to go back to the situation where not everything is hosted on some megaplatform. I think it's better for the internet that way.
I like to think that sort of movement is making a resurgence, I'm seeing more people involved in self-hosting stuff, and with recent changes at Reddit and Twitter there's a lot more interest in decentralized communication platforms.
I also think the platform is the key. I don't think any one person or group should be in charge of the public square. Not Spez not Elon and certainly not Tencent or anyone connected with an authoritarian government.
The problem is, you won't get the sort of compatibility you enjoy now any more. So many different applications, phone keyboards etc support gfycat and that's where all the content is.
They won't support dozens of disparate led popular services spread across the internet.
Those services are also likely to be less reliable, less well moderated for offensive/illegal content and such, and more likely to randomly disappear.
Like why Reddit was such a success, I want stability. I want one, reliable, centralised place I can go for everything.
Another concern I have, considering Lemmy specifically, is hacking of their infrastructure. Is my Lemmy account data as secure as my Reddit account? No. The software isn't as secure, and the security teams are non existent, it's just a guy (a wonderful guy!) hosting this as a hobby.
And even if one server does get a proper tech security team, that's just one server.
There's also the question of WHO is hosting a Lemmy instance being used, are they trustworthy? Are they being independently audited? Have they been found in compliance with GDPR? Are they secretly selling our data? Could be, who knows.
For all the awful things that come with a big company like Reddit, there's more scrutiny, accountability, etc.
I don't mean to diss Lemmy, I'm really really hopeful for it. I just have a lot of early concerns, things they'll have to solve before I can really see it being the trustworthy, solid cornerstone of the internet I'd like it to be.
I don't think it's wrong to keep questions like these in mind, it's great for information security and your privacy!
I'm with ya - no hate and no ill will to the hosts of any of these instances, but a cautious or informed user is a safe user. And safe users tend to mean user longevity on a platform! So it's kind of cyclical, the "safety> accountability> user" relationship.
Search engines will just have to get better at scrubbing their databases. Most of this stuff is ephemeral so it's usually a deep search that leads to these old threads...and future dead links. Distributed services isn't bad, it's just different. Pre-web it was archie, gopher, veronica, usenet, etc. Now all those things - or their equivalent data - run on top of the web. It's just an evolution.
I say we all go back to browsing the web via Lynx and chatting it up on IRC. Who's with me?
I miss IRC…
Me too. I think it's not missing the platform or the protocol, it's the attitude that went with it. It was a time of experimentation, people would spin up websites and services and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't but it was ours. People would forward a port to a spare laptop and make a shitty server for IRC or shoutcast or video game or something like that and it all belong to us, there were no huge platforms in charge. Each community could set their own rules and not have to worry about what an advertiser was okay with. And there weren't big platforms scraping every last keystroke further monetize us.
It was a lot less accessible for people not willing to learn technical skill, but I think in many ways we were better off. There was a lot more freedom and more independence.
The tech knowledge was its own gatekeeping and filter. I also miss slapping people with a wet trout... Actually, it's mostly the trout nostalgia for me...
LazaroFilm slaps SirEDCaLot around a bit with a large trout
Three or four huge companies sounds terrible
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.
We need to choose. Link rot or massive megacorps owning everything on the Internet.
I hope that IPFS (or something like it) may end up improving that dichotomy
Is this how a recession feels?
Honestly didn't expect it to be THIS kind of recession
An internet/social media recession, we're truly living in the 21st century.
I still remember the Photobucket apocalypse back in the day. One day to the next seemed like internet only had "broken link" images.
Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time.
A long time.
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:
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?
The current wave seems more severe due to centralization and coincidence.
Twitter, Reddit, Imgur, Gfycat and a bunch of others seem to all crash themselves practically over night - and the same night at that. And due to centralization/monopolies, that means a significant chunk of the respective niches are gone without a clear replacement. And especially reddit was a niche aggregator.
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 think these services need to think about monetization from the beginning rather than the "make product, get users, ???, Profit".
TFW Calico Cut Pants has a better business model than 90% of websites in the world. It's 100% user funded. You gotta give!
I'm a bit surprised they lasted this long to he honest. How did they make money? Ads?
They make money by selling information about you.
Not a lot of information to sell from a single GET request when an image is embedded on a third party website or app.
Edit: come to think of it, maybe you're right, and this is in response to 3rd party cookies being phased out pretty much everywhere.
My first thought was my NSFW reddit account... If they didn't already kill it with 3rd party apps, I'd be bummed...
I guess it's just impossible to make these types of large media storage sites profitable. The business model itself is inherently unprofitable despite there being a need for these sites. Like youtube will never bring a cent back to google, but they keep running it because it locks people into their ecosystem for data harvesting.
Could also be that snap bought gfycat just to kill it.
Storage is just the loss leader of the internet, really. Companies will take the loss for access to the data.
Free storage. Backblaze is doing just fine.
That is why I called it a loss leader. It is meant to attract people to the ecosystem (hence free), not be the product itself. Of course if you are appropriately creating, pricing, and selling low cost storage as a business model, you will nail it.
YouTube is very profitable now. MEGA is probably profitable.
I'm not surprised. How can this be sustainable? Images are embedded in the websites with no way for Gfycat to make any revenue.
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.
sounds like they should have asked u/spez for some advice on API pricing. /s
This past year in particular has really hammered it in for me that even if you can never truly delete something from the internet, it doesn't mean it'll still be there when you're looking for it. Saving a link to something is not saving it at all, and I'm starting to become a data hoarder.
Man, I really feel like the internet is under a major shake up at the moment. Feels weird.
edit: spelling
I used Gfycat (before uploads broke) all the time mainly for its silent autoplay in Discord to share gaming clips with my friends. Any alternatives? Or am I now just slapping my vids straight into Discord?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
