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Cloud storage is expensive, I’m willing to bet that’s a lot of money saved at their scale.

Maintaining a massive scale infra with the same availability and durability as S3 is really expensive. It's possible but hard.

But do you need S3 durability for meme gifs that will be seen once and then just waste disk space for decades?

At least temporarily old images weren't available and some people cared: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/08/19/twitter-de...

There's a difference between "all images" and "one in 100 million images"

S3 durability is "for every ten million objects stored, you can expect to incur an average loss of a single object once every 10,000 years". They could drop the durability by probably 5 9's and nobody would even notice.

Maybe not, but you could switch to single-zone S3 in that case and cut your costs down ~70%.

Migrating storage off of cloud is just really hard.

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