The image site Abload going offline reminds me of how much online content we have permanently lost
In a devastating blog post, image upload site Abload announced that it would permanently close its website by June 30, 2024. Abload, which has existed as a free service since 2006, stopped accepting new uploads in December 2023.
According to the blog post, the team had tried for four months to keep the site running, but ultimately failed and now the entire content β ββboth older images and links β has been forfeited. What makes this even more tragic is that it is something that continues to happen as the Internet becomes more and more profit-oriented and centralized.
This phenomenon recently occurred at Gliphy, a free site where you could upload and create GIFs that could then be shared across the Internet. Gliphy eventually collapsed and with it the entire extent of his many years of collection. Just like that, the internet history was erased. Even some of my own works have suffered thanks to the loss of this valuable resource.
Remnants of the old internet are disappearing
There’s a pattern here, where websites of the older Internet were built to allow users to freely create and share content, pushing them to adopt a subscription model to survive, or perish and dump the entire catalog of content on to sacrifice. Even when we look at our best sites for saving and sharing photos list, the only items that have survived from that era are Flickr and Photobucket, with the latter completely eliminating the free-use option.
It’s really hard to see how much online history is being lost, with very few methods left to preserve it (the Wayback Machine, a great resource, can’t preserve Abload’s images). Personal cloud storage has grown in popularity over the years, but as you can see from our aforementioned list, almost none have the same function as these older websites. They are solely for storing photos, but you cannot share or embed them on other websites.
It shows how much the internet has changed in recent decades. Unfortunately, the reality is that as the internet changes, instead of preserving the past, it is instead thrown away and lost to time. This also has the added effect of breaking old websites and forums that contain a significant amount of images from hosting sites like Abload, meaning that even more of what remains of archived content is further lost and ruined.