Data Lifeboat

This is by "Flickr Foundation" (flickr.org). It's a separate entity from "Flickr" (flickr.com).

I could not find out the relationship between the two, but I did see that flickr.org's treasurer is flickr.com's CFO; and flickr.com's "President & COO" is "board observer" at flickr.org.

My first reaction was "they are going to be sued to death because of trademarks", but I am guessing having flickr.com's COO on board of directors makes it less likely.

Hi. I'm George Oates, exec director and co-founder of the Flickr Foundation, Flickr.org. I was glad to see that Hacker News has picked up on Data Lifeboat! That was a big spike for our quiet blog.

I am popping in to clarify the relationship between Flickr.com and Flickr.org (and I get asked this a lot, so we will write it up on Flickr.org in more detail). The Flickr Foundation is a separate entity, a US 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation. It enjoys the permission of Flickr to use the Flickr trademarks, and runs its own finances. We have been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation to think about what it takes to meaningfully preserve a social media system of this scale, and look forward to working with more funders in the USA and elsewhere. We are happy to have minority representation from the company on our board - that's Stephanie, company CFO, and Ben MacAskill also sits in to stay in touch. This is good, and the company isn't funding us directly, which is something we actually want.

You can read Ben's "Why we're doing this" blog post, from 2022:

* https://www.flickr.org/why-were-doing-this/

We chat regularly with various groups at the company, like engineering, marketing, and community. The team there have helped us get established, no doubt about that. And, rather than any litigation flying around, I genuinely think it is an act of responsibility for a company to support the creation of a 'sister nonprofit' which is able to think on a different time scale that a corporation normally does, also recognising the unique collection Flickr has become.

I am really happy to meet with anyone who is interested to talk more about what we're doing, and offer this in the form of "Unoffice Hours" which you can book via our Contact Us page:

* https://www.flickr.org/contact-us/

Cheers.

I like the idea, but it seems to have come a little too late to save everything on Flickr.

Flickr themselves started purging any public images over a certain amount on free accounts.

I only found out after seeing a Flickr email in my spam inbox after several months of the start of the purge, so some of my images had already been purged.

I suppose their approach was still preferable to deleting everything at once.

seems very self-serving to me. They granted us free money to maintain what we are already maintaining as part of our business. This is like giving Google a grant to index the internet. Internet Archive would be more deserving of this grant.