From their website: 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.
This has been a strange year.
While this year has been painful for the data preservationist part of me, I also couldn’t be more excited for the rise of the small web and open platforms.
Yeah all that information disappearing is a huge disappointment.
But realistically while Reddit Inc own that data it was always going to happen eventually. If it wasn’t the demand from LLMs pushing them to lock it away so they can monetise it, it’d have been a move like Twitter blocking non logged in users, or just them purging old data to save money or something.
I keep saying that it’s like losing a shitty Library of Alexandria.