Sign into an existing account

(AOU, 2020, from the link above.)

And what happened earlier this year? Epic fail. Pic8 shut down with no warning, taking redirects to over a hundred thousand pictures with it. Memes, funny screenshots, all inaccessible. Its operator Picman stopped responding to inquiries and disappeared.

This is what inevitably happens with no decentralized backups. And given that pic8 only stored URLs, not the actual files, it would not have been difficult to mirror it.

The idea behind Pic8 was a noble one: mirroring uploaded images to multiple image hosts so the image remains if one image host went down. Image hosts like imgtc - remember that one? From the 2017-2019 Voat days? Garbage.

Pic8 did not actually host uploaded images, it just redirected to the various image hosts, so the promise was that it would be able to operate indefinitely given the low costs. While Pic8 was mainly associated with poal.co, some Voat users used Pic8 back in 2020.

But this did not protect against the fact that pic8 itself can shut down. Cracks were already showing early. Pic8.co had frequent downtimes, so it was never reliable to begin with.

AOU also took down poal.co/s/pic8 and poal.co/s/picinfinity, the discussion forums used for pic8. Looks like he accepted the fate that pic8 will not come back and that relying on this garbage was a foolish idea.

Catbox isn't much better. They have purged most of the stuff from the Voat days. So don't overrely on it either. Also, the name catbox sounds quite furry. Save anything that matters locally.

I release this post into the public domain under CC0 1.0, excluding quotes. You can copy and paste it wherever you wish.

----

Full post:



Aged like milk.