Instagram deleting archived stories, turning old videos into photos

67 pointsposted a year ago
by tantalor

26 Comments

avalys

a year ago

This looks more like they had a bug and lost a few, other than a static photo representation that was probably stored independently.

srik

a year ago

It affected a lot more people actually, including one of my old account’s main video posts, so not just stories. It wasn’t popular but still sucked because I was featuring penmanship in motion but now many of them are just static screenshots. But that’s the implicit risk when hosting on someone else’s platform so c'est la vie I guess.

[1] https://www.instagram.com/sri.letterstudy

netsharc

a year ago

Geez, yeah, that notice reads like they lost some data. And didn't tell anyone about it, unless you looked. And in July 2025 they'll memory-hole the "Sorry^W, we lost your data." notice.

Edit: Correction, there's no "Sorry".

benterix

a year ago

Once they decided to block showing new posts for tags, leaving only the so-called "top posts", I stopped using Instagram as it stopped making any sense to me, i.e. I could no longer find anything interesting.

justinator

a year ago

What did you start using, instead?

dylan604

a year ago

Maybe they are happy in recovery instead of constantly chasing the tail of the dragon. That would be the happiest ending

justsomehnguy

a year ago

LOL?

You don't need to be glued to some social media service 24/7.

justinator

a year ago

Judgement aside,

I used the tag to see conditions of areas I wanted to visit. Like if someone tagged photos, #NationalPark, I could see how much snow was on the ground and bring the right gear.

KTibow

a year ago

If getting off it was that easy, a lot less people would be using social media

benterix

a year ago

I believe yes, it's that easy. Zuck is breaking your feed posting ads and low quality retention content, you see only the most vocal discussions, people who post less often are not shown at all, and one day you realize your old FB which was more about connecting with others is just full of shit you have no intention of following at all. Sometimes your muscle memory wins so you open it once or twice to see what is going on, still same unpleasant experience, and then you quit.

benterix

a year ago

Nothing, really. I was tracking the tag #contemporaryart. Some of this was obvious shit, spam, low quality work and so on. But sometimes I could spot real pearls, extremely interesting pieces of work with 1 or 2 likes and no way to get to "top posts" because the artist had too few followers etc. When they turned it off, I basically stopped using Instagram after a few attempts to recreate the experience.

livinglist

a year ago

I do find that my video stories from months ago have very severely degraded image quality.

CatWChainsaw

a year ago

I never understand why addicted users of social media feel the need to upload so many pictures and videos. Even if you were only doing one per day, how often do you think you'd look back at that one? Is there anything of significance to your stupid TikTok besides a fleeting chance at fleeting virality? When storage fills limitless they feel compelled to fill it with meaningless BS. In an era before smartphones you had to be judicious with what you recorded. We could use that mindset a lot more. And free up a lot of storage space.

jjulius

a year ago

Yet another friendly reminder that your data isn't yours unless you store it locally.

AStonesThrow

a year ago

And you wrote/maintain the app that can open, process, and serve that data. And you can keep up with storage technologies as they age and become obsolete. And you can run a perfect IDS/IPS/DLP/firewall secure environment with your own custom self-hosted cloud. And your local cloud has four-nines high-availability clustering, power, and network peering. glhf.

jchw

a year ago

Or you could just copy the JPEG files to multiple devices, using... files, without any specific app. You could use any old software that can copy files from one place to another, like SyncThing, which will happily sit in the background and copy your photos to whatever devices you currently use. If SyncThing stops getting updated, switch to something else. Or copy it by hand again.

Images are files. You do not need to be a computer scientist. If you want them to last, make copies.

Let me just preempt it ahead of time:

> "But what if everything I know and love burns to the ground?"

Consider the following: if all of your computers/phones/tablets/NASes/etc. are destroyed simultaneously, you might have bigger concerns to worry about than losing some photos.

jbaber

a year ago

I used to think this way until I started helping friends with iphones. There's no concept of local file, just things hosted in different places. My friend couldn't even download an image I hosted at website to their device.

jjulius

a year ago

You're over-engineering what is otherwise a straightforward solution for this particular instance. Instagram allows you to save stories to your mobile device, so...

1.) Download your story to your mobile device. Congratulations, you now have your own copy of your story that is yours and not under control of Instagram. You could stop here if you want, or you could...

2.) Copy the file to another device you might keep in your home. This could be a desktop, a laptop, a NAS, a generic external hard drive, whathaveyou. Congratulations, now you have three copies of this (Instagram's servers, your mobile device, and whatever third option you chose).

With video content like this, they're typically in popular formats that are unlikely to "go out of style" any time soon.

Beyond this particular instance? You're still over-engineering things. Most people are pretty simple - they want to keep their photos and videos, maybe some word documents and such, music and movies. Those formats are so standardized that all you need to do is store them on any electronic device you own at home, and move them to whatever new device you get when you upgrade. There's certainly a non-zero risk of device failure, but as we see in this very thread, there's also a non-zero risk of data loss in the cloud, so... c'est la vie.

Nobody really needs all of what you described in order to keep most of what they want.

AStonesThrow

a year ago

Y'all are being weird about content from an online service that, I would assume, is meant to be shared with others, not hoarded on your local storage.

I don't know what IG "archiving" entails, does it remove stories from public view or something?

The main point of using an online service like IG is for serving and sharing your content. Not keeping it to yourself. IG stores and serves public content in a secure fashion, with very high availability and unparalelled reachability.

You've replied to my "over-engineering" with single-user hoarding solutions. Do you want to serve the content or not?

IG posts involve more than a JPEG. "Stories" are slideshows made of multiple items. There is metadata, tagging, other users: context. If you want to download a couple of JPEGs and lose all that context, you're not using IG anymore, you're hoarding.

gcarvalho

a year ago

And also that 1 copy is (eventually) 0 copies.

user

a year ago

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