Sad and terrible news for those who love to use GIF animations as a complement to their messages sent by messaging applications, their publications on websites and their content on other social networks: the site gfycat has announced his future and unfortunate death.
This repository of animations had positioned itself as one of the most popular on the planet, although not the most recurring and famous. Now this circumstance seems to have had a direct impact, to such a degree that the project was already unsustainable.
GIF animations are a curiosity inherited from the first era of the internet at the end of the 20th century. When it was impossible to share videos due to the great weight that those files had and the very low speed of connection that was experienced on the Internet in those days.
In the end it was more functional to send a GIF animation file, also heavy, but not as much as a clip with audio and video. Later, with the emergence of social networks and the birth of the smartphone, these files found a new vocation as a complement to text messages.
In fact not long ago we saw how even instagram Finally, it was integrated into this trend by adding support for these animations in direct chat messages.
With this change it seemed that GIF repository sites would have their future more assured, but it seems not.
Gfycat announces its death and will delete all GIF files in its catalog
the colleagues of Hacker News have discovered the formal notification notice about the imminent death of the Gfycat site that appeared unobtrusively for all those users who now visit the site.
Where Snap, Gyfcat’s parent company, reveals that it plans to shut down the GIF database and remove all user content within a few weeks:
“Gfycat service is being interrupted. Save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging into your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be removed from gfycat.com”.
However, this news about Gfycat’s impending demise will come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to use the site in recent months.
Since May 2023, the possibility of his death had been suspected when revealed that Snap had deliberately allowed Gfycat’s security certificates to expire.
At that time, the only explanation for this act was that they had no plans to continue with the project and now it has been officially confirmed.
Undoubtedly Gfycat had moments of greater glory, but since last year the platform had become an unstable site, where even the integration of GIF animations had become problematic.
This is how one of the most popular sites in its field dies.