After being purchased by Snapchat, it appears that gfycat has been abandoned.
The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
The issue with creating a gif hosting service is not the code itself (which open source would solve) but the cost of doing so and the fact its not very profitable.
Covering expenses (and let alone being profitable) is a huge issue with most online services. People are loath to pay for content and services even voluntarily nowadays, but they also don’t like ads (for a good reason, mind you), so staying afloat is tricky. Especially open source projects can have problems with this; I’ve seen many FOSS projects start getting hostile comments from users when they try to somehow monetize (even without it being “predatory” in any way) simply to be compensated for the time they put in
Social media and data storage/distribution has clearly become an integral part of modern society. Time for governments to treat them as the utilities they are.
Yeah, I definitely agree. Online services are still sort of treated as just being “fluff” in some sense, instead of huge parts of our daily lives that have similar implications that “meatspace” utilities do