First off: great work!
The age old question is how you afford to run this, and how if you get popular do you not become an imgur yourself and have their same pressures to delete, moderate and make money.
The age old question is how you afford to run this, and how if you get popular do you not become an imgur yourself and have their same pressures to delete, moderate and make money.
I don't believe it should be government funded, but I wish there was a protocol that would let my ISP allocate a few GB of resources on my behalf that stay online even when my PC is powered down, and then I could reference them anywhere, and there's be a succession protocol in case I move to a different ISP so links don't break, etc.
So now you need caps. And enforcement. And exceptions. And suddenly, you have a cloud service provider. And they've invested a ton into making the place nice, and there are teams drawing salaries keeping this running, and "succession protocols" aren't making them any money.
What you're asking for is infrastructure. Humanity to date has not found a way to finance long-term working infrastructure that doesn't involve a government, because that's the only body that invests in the commons. (Yeah, sometimes we pretend we can privatize, and then you get PG&E, and everybody suffers)
Anyway, "hosting" would mean two things: 1: "I attach my name to this content and it's always locatable as a tag under my name", and 2: "I dedicate some static resources to always host this content, whether or not it's popular enough to also propagate to other nodes in the swarm, I will always seed it".
Then simply having that seed-box allocate a certain amount of its space to each subscriber would be all you'd need.
Succession protocol would have internal uses too; they could say "Hey this subscriber has some really popular content, let's move it to a faster node", and the same primitives would track that move.
I feel like most of these pieces already exist, the trouble is there's no longer an expectation for an ISP to provide hosting to customers, so providing better hosting isn't a differentiating factor. (Not that there's meaningful competition in many places anyway, which may be the root of the problem.)
Which all adds up to people not realizing there is or even could be an alternative to hosting their images on perpetually-unprofitable-and-thus-inevitably-transient services like photobucket, imgur, and their ilk.
But sure, privatize gains and externalize losses works too :)
I don't think there ever was any free method of mass distributing information. Or storing it if someone didn't find it interesting. If you need to share something, you should burden the cost. Just because some idiots thought they had a model that didn't work doesn't mean there isn't real costs involved. And those should be paid. In free market they should approach margin.
Also I'm already paying my ISP for a connection, and so is everyone that views the things I host, so personally I hope for advances in P2P to leverage that existing already-paid-for bandwidth for distribution instead of having to toss more money on top.
If only there was some way to gather and organize this rich fraction of users' contributions. Maybe we could create some kind of assembly where we discuss and vote on how to do so.
>Why is "the government should pay for it" always a comment in every thread on HN? Is there something I haven't understood about this community.
Because the purpose of government is to organize and manage society and that requires funds to do so? I'm not sure how to answer such a simple question with such a self-evident answer. How old are you?
And yes, you do need to convince me: If it's "publicly funded" then I (and everyone else) am/are paying for it. Personally, I would sooner pay for another US navy aircraft carrier.
In terms of a government funded imgur backup: nah not convinced!
Don't you already pay for it?
In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.
As a sidenote, reddit is (was?) the one of main user of imgur, however https://www.google.com/search?q=%22haasie.com%22+site%3Aredd... yields no results - maybe it is worth to promote it there also.
One is to turn off any new uploads, and just serve the existing content, presumably the bandwidth on old content would be much lower - until some sustainable plan can be devised.
Last resort is to approach the ArchiveTeam mentioned here to see if and we could to setup a maintenance service.
To your side note, yes, I want to promote it on Reddit, as soon as I've added a few more features - like donations.