Instagram deleting archived stories, turning old videos into photos | Hacker News Reader

Instagram deleting archived stories, turning old videos into photos

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67 pointstantalor26 comments

This looks more like they had a bug and lost a few, other than a static photo representation that was probably stored independently.

Geez, yeah, that notice reads like they lost some data. And didn't tell anyone about it, unless you looked. And in July 2025 they'll memory-hole the "Sorry^W, we lost your data." notice.

Edit: Correction, there's no "Sorry".

It affected a lot more people actually, including one of my old account’s main video posts, so not just stories. It wasn’t popular but still sucked because I was featuring penmanship in motion but now many of them are just static screenshots. But that’s the implicit risk when hosting on someone else’s platform so c'est la vie I guess.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/sri.letterstudy

That xkcd is relevant again: https://xkcd.com/1150

Also relevant https://xkcd.com/1683/

Once they decided to block showing new posts for tags, leaving only the so-called "top posts", I stopped using Instagram as it stopped making any sense to me, i.e. I could no longer find anything interesting.

What did you start using, instead?

Maybe they are happy in recovery instead of constantly chasing the tail of the dragon. That would be the happiest ending

LOL?

You don't need to be glued to some social media service 24/7.

If getting off it was that easy, a lot less people would be using social media

I believe yes, it's that easy. Zuck is breaking your feed posting ads and low quality retention content, you see only the most vocal discussions, people who post less often are not shown at all, and one day you realize your old FB which was more about connecting with others is just full of shit you have no intention of following at all. Sometimes your muscle memory wins so you open it once or twice to see what is going on, still same unpleasant experience, and then you quit.

Judgement aside,

I used the tag to see conditions of areas I wanted to visit. Like if someone tagged photos, #NationalPark, I could see how much snow was on the ground and bring the right gear.

Nothing, really. I was tracking the tag #contemporaryart. Some of this was obvious shit, spam, low quality work and so on. But sometimes I could spot real pearls, extremely interesting pieces of work with 1 or 2 likes and no way to get to "top posts" because the artist had too few followers etc. When they turned it off, I basically stopped using Instagram after a few attempts to recreate the experience.

Life imitates art: https://xkcd.com/1150/

I do find that my video stories from months ago have very severely degraded image quality.

"Reportedly". Story from July.

Something more substantial than twitter anecdote post

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/07/31/tech/instagram-story-arch...

I never understand why addicted users of social media feel the need to upload so many pictures and videos. Even if you were only doing one per day, how often do you think you'd look back at that one? Is there anything of significance to your stupid TikTok besides a fleeting chance at fleeting virality? When storage fills limitless they feel compelled to fill it with meaningless BS. In an era before smartphones you had to be judicious with what you recorded. We could use that mindset a lot more. And free up a lot of storage space.

Yet another friendly reminder that your data isn't yours unless you store it locally.

And also that 1 copy is (eventually) 0 copies.

And you wrote/maintain the app that can open, process, and serve that data. And you can keep up with storage technologies as they age and become obsolete. And you can run a perfect IDS/IPS/DLP/firewall secure environment with your own custom self-hosted cloud. And your local cloud has four-nines high-availability clustering, power, and network peering. glhf.

You're over-engineering what is otherwise a straightforward solution for this particular instance. Instagram allows you to save stories to your mobile device, so...

1.) Download your story to your mobile device. Congratulations, you now have your own copy of your story that is yours and not under control of Instagram. You could stop here if you want, or you could...

2.) Copy the file to another device you might keep in your home. This could be a desktop, a laptop, a NAS, a generic external hard drive, whathaveyou. Congratulations, now you have three copies of this (Instagram's servers, your mobile device, and whatever third option you chose).

With video content like this, they're typically in popular formats that are unlikely to "go out of style" any time soon.

Beyond this particular instance? You're still over-engineering things. Most people are pretty simple - they want to keep their photos and videos, maybe some word documents and such, music and movies. Those formats are so standardized that all you need to do is store them on any electronic device you own at home, and move them to whatever new device you get when you upgrade. There's certainly a non-zero risk of device failure, but as we see in this very thread, there's also a non-zero risk of data loss in the cloud, so... c'est la vie.

Nobody really needs all of what you described in order to keep most of what they want.

Y'all are being weird about content from an online service that, I would assume, is meant to be shared with others, not hoarded on your local storage.

I don't know what IG "archiving" entails, does it remove stories from public view or something?

The main point of using an online service like IG is for serving and sharing your content. Not keeping it to yourself. IG stores and serves public content in a secure fashion, with very high availability and unparalelled reachability.

You've replied to my "over-engineering" with single-user hoarding solutions. Do you want to serve the content or not?

IG posts involve more than a JPEG. "Stories" are slideshows made of multiple items. There is metadata, tagging, other users: context. If you want to download a couple of JPEGs and lose all that context, you're not using IG anymore, you're hoarding.

>I don't know what IG "archiving" entails, does it remove stories from public view or something?

Ah, there's the disconnect.

"Stories" only display for 24 hours, and then they're gone from your profile. That said, they're saved in a story archive that only you have access to - ostensibly, as it says in their settings menu, so you "don't have to save them to your phone". They're not being served to users, they're just there for you to look back on, and maybe re-share if you want to in the future.

>Do you want to serve the content or not?

Maybe. Maybe not. It's up to the individual to decide. My point is, it does not have to be that complicated for things that one wants to, essentially, just archive.

>The main point of using an online service like IG is for serving and sharing your content. Not keeping it to yourself.

Sure! And what happens if something that you really want shared on your IG profile gets deleted from a bug like this? Wouldn't it help to, I dunno... have that stored somewhere "in case of emergencies"? ;)

Or you could just copy the JPEG files to multiple devices, using... files, without any specific app. You could use any old software that can copy files from one place to another, like SyncThing, which will happily sit in the background and copy your photos to whatever devices you currently use. If SyncThing stops getting updated, switch to something else. Or copy it by hand again.

Images are files. You do not need to be a computer scientist. If you want them to last, make copies.

Let me just preempt it ahead of time:

> "But what if everything I know and love burns to the ground?"

Consider the following: if all of your computers/phones/tablets/NASes/etc. are destroyed simultaneously, you might have bigger concerns to worry about than losing some photos.

I used to think this way until I started helping friends with iphones. There's no concept of local file, just things hosted in different places. My friend couldn't even download an image I hosted at website to their device.

I'm not telling anyone they have to or should do this, only to tell them what they can do. You don't need any special software to copy files. If you really, really want to, you can periodically plug your phone in and copy photos off over MTP, to a computer that does have something like SyncThing installed. Is it convenient, or fast, or sleek? No. But you have that option. If you don't like being forced into choices like this you are free to buy a different phone.

Though, I just want to be clear: there really is a concept of local files on iPhone, both iPhoneOS and iPadOS have a file browser which is not just cloud-synced, and there's even an unofficial SyncThing client (though they locked photos syncing behind an IAP, of course.) I don't currently use iPhone as a daily driver but I can grab an iPhoneOS device right now and save an image from any website, no problem. It's the same thing I'd do anywhere else. There is some complexity around photos versus files that's bound to confuse people, but it's really beside the point, nothing is stopping you from saving/copying/backing up files on iOS. Of course, Apple will absolutely not let you get a first-class experience with anything other than iCloud. Third party apps don't get similar capabilities. A lot of time I spent using iPhone was actually spent sitting in apps like Google Photos trying to let them actually get caught up with their syncing because Apple are dickheads. Whatever.

But I'm not going to try to convince someone that it's worth switching to Android, manually syncing files, paying for an IAP, etc. to locally back up their files. In my opinion, the value of agency can only be learned, not taught. If anyone wants help getting some of it back, I'm happy to try to help within the bounds of what they want. If they don't, it's not my place to tell them how to live. (I'm definitely upset at how badly people are being exploited, but that's a job regulators are slacking on. It's not people's job to not be exploited.)

What I'd really like are phones that don't suck, but we're done making those. You get a heavily locked-down glass slab with a huge camera bump, no expansion options, no headphone jack, and glass that breaks when you drop it 3 feet. Frankly, I'm constantly looking for ways to simply ditch the phone entirely at this point.

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