Imgur will also be deleting images that aren't associated with a user account. https://help.imgur.com/hc/en-us/articles/14415587638029/
For 10+ years, imgur has been many people's go-to way of hosting an image they want to post to a forum or whatever. Many of those people will have paid little attention to whether or not they were logged into imgur when they posted each image. In short, it sounds like a lot of image links are about to break.
Which seems... aspirational?
Let's see how it goes
The big ones do. There is stil the long tail of forums and legacy chat platforms that don't do hosting or have extreme limits. That is what will be most affected by this change.
I wonder if they are hemorrhaging money. This decision gives the impression that they simply don't want to be in the business they're currently in. Such drastic steps usually originate with desperation.
Or they could do what Facebook used to do (still does?), and put them on Blu-ray disk cold storage, then load them into one of those giant jukebox-esque machines that grabs the Blu-ray disk whenever someone click an ancient link and spend 60 seconds serving the image up or whatever.
Hell, write all the images with their URLs to magnetic tape and donate them to the Internet archive, and let them figure out what to do with them if/when they eventually have the funds.
Literally anything would be better than outright deleting those old images.
https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/cloud/article/11431537/in...
The blog post has a link to video from FB itself from 2014 and it has no audio. its not the first old FB video I came across that had no audio. Wonder if the cold storage has something to do with it.
https://web.facebook.com/Engineering/videos/1015212866009720...
In my data hoarding days (as a consumer, not FB scale), I found burning media an archive tool to be much more costly (and less reliable and more physical space) than simply using multiple hard drives.
Now, it could very well be that FB is able to buy burnable media at a much cheaper rate than consumers (i.e. perhaps there is more margin in media that massively bulk purchasing can reduce and the type of HDs that FB would buy would be more expensive than consumer drives, it could also be that actively used burnable media would be more reliable than actively used hard drives. while it's cold storage, its not frozen storage that is rarely used, with that said, the jukeboxes are probably expensive and suffer more reliablity issues than the hard drives), but on the consumer level, it just didn't seem to be a doable thing.
Ex: 8TB HD could cost $120. That's ~ 400 25GB single layer blurays. Now, 400 disks of optical media no matter how efficient one can store them will take up a lot more room than a single 8TB HD. For the 400 bluray blanks to be cheaper than the HD, they would have to be less than 30cents a disk. Glancing at amazon today, the cheapest I see for 25GB BDR blanks (and dual/triple/quad layer blanks are more expensive per GB, i.e. a 50GB blank would be $1.6 a disc) is about 40cents a disk. At that price level, you are better off just buying/copying to multiple disks for even better disaster recovery and it wont really cost you more than to store everything once on optical media.
anyways, if anyone could point out flaws in my assumptions (or why at FB scale the answers are different) I'd be interested.
That's a random study I found on Google, of course, I'm sure Meta has more accurate data on that.
Besides, you need to build the same kind of redundancy in both cases, so that shouldn't influence the choice.
[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/conservation-institute/services/con...
Also consider the economics of actually retrieving and indexing the data. If you have to spend 2 hours looking for a blu-ray/DVD with the data you need, then maybe it changes the economics back to HDDs, which can look up a file within 20 TB of data almost instantaneously using an NTFS Journal.
Presumably this was done to show ads on the page
Possibly they did different things for different IP blocks?
I stopped using imgur several years ago precisely because I couldn't upload anything easily, account or no account.
Mobile in particular couldn't upload period, the feature(?) simply wasn't even there.
I've since moved on to using Discord, specifically a private "server" I made for the purpose, for my image hosting needs. God knows how long that arrangement will last.
All this to say imgur has been useless garbage for many years, its decline to irrelevance is long overdue.
I frequently use Imgur because of its built in support in various tools such as Greenshot.
I can upload by just pasting into the client, and it works anywhere Discord works. I can access images from anywhere by using/sharing the direct links.
If I can easily and simply upload and access images, that's all I want out of an image hoster. Everything else is signal noise.
Personally I am running a mediagoblin server on a Droplet but I have a feeling that only works as long as nothing I make ever goes viral.
I have used imgur numerous times thru the years when posting Stack Overflow questions, new feature pull requests on open source apps, troubleshooting reddit posts etc. Very sad to think all that visual context will be lost.
Imgur support wouldn't respond to forum owners.
One of imgur's selling points was you opened imgur.com and hit cmd+v to paste the screenshot, or dragged the image over, and bam! You had a sharable version. No muss, no fuss.
The number of times I have used this to share something on a forum or troubleshoot something is uncountable.
"We will be focused on removing old, unused, and inactive content that is not tied to a user account"
What is old, unused and inactive?
That could be 10 year old images or 10 month old images. I have no idea.
Is an image getting regular hits going to be deleted? Who knows...
I guess many will still be on archive.org if someone is late to the party downloading a backup.
Anyway, a good trigger to make a donation I guess.
Another option is of course to have many smaller hosts, down to personal sites at the extreme. But that only changes the loss from shutdowns from big events to a steady stream of entropy. We really need a much more expanded Internet Archvie that can serve content at reasonable speeds along with browser and forum plugins to automatically redirect old linnks there.