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
It’s a tough spot to be in, and one that I’m not convinced the fediverse will solve. Stuff has to get hosted somewhere, and video hosting is expensive. Taking away control from giant companies is great, but I don’t see what’s in it for people to take on hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in hosting cost for their instances without making any money from it.
Right now I think fediverse users are power users who are much more likely to contribute, but if lemmy or mammoth ever got as big as Reddit or Twitter, the vast majority of users won’t be willing to pay, and I don’t see how that works
I know nothing technical about how the fediverse works, but I can potentially see a bittorrent-like future for the fediverse, with people contributing spare compute power or bandwidth to the network when they’re online.
