PSharing

» see psharing.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

PSharing was small even by Hungarian standards, and the people who tracked it said so plainly. Two hundred to three hundred pictures went up on an average day. That is a modest number for a country of ten million, and Hungary is not a large internet to begin with. Nothing about this one traveled. It was a local utility in a language almost nobody outside the country reads, which is the ordinary condition of most of the web and the reason most of the web disappears quietly.

What it did, it did well for nine years. You uploaded a picture and got back a short link. Images were numbered with a plain incrementing counter, so the eight hundred thousandth upload lived at the address ending 800000, and knowing the number was enough to fetch it whether or not the uploader had marked it public. Every upload came back at three sizes, the smallest a 140 pixel thumbnail and the largest whatever you had sent. There was an album feature almost nobody used, under five hundred albums in nine years.

Behind it was Hajdina Bt., a small Hungarian company that looked stable from the outside and seemed to treat the site as a shop window. They kept posting on Facebook. They used the image host to advertise their other attempts, which included a marketplace and a link shortener, neither of which went anywhere, and in 2015 a webhosting business called tarhelyotthon.hu that did.

~ the dossier ~

~ the download that was still running ~

In April 2015 an Archive Team volunteer working under the handle bzc6p started copying the whole thing, one numbered image at a time. He began with the private pictures on the reasoning that those were the ones a shutdown would take first, and he got all of them, every ID from 1 to 829,999. Then he started on the public ones.

He was at image 50,206 when the server stopped answering. The archiving log puts the first connect timeout at 17:49 on 11 May 2016, and by 19:34 that evening both psharing.com and ivpicture.hu were redirecting to the hosting business. Everything above 50,206 in the public range is gone, along with every album. The rescue was thirteen months old and roughly six percent finished on the half it was working on when the thing it was rescuing went away.

~ nobody said anything ~

There was no farewell page and no blog post anywhere. The Facebook page had around eight thousand followers and carried no word of it either, which is the detail that makes the silence deliberate rather than accidental: somebody was still logging into that account. On 18 May, a week after the servers went dark, the page posted a cute animal picture.

bzc6p filled in the contact form on tarhelyotthon.hu the day after the shutdown, because the hosting business offered no email address. He never got a reply. As of a month later the site had still not been acknowledged as closed by anyone who ran it.

~ what answers now ~

ivpicture.hu returns a two kilobyte page reading "Success!", which is the default greeting a freshly configured web server sends when nobody has put anything on it yet. psharing.com returns something worse: a hundred kilobyte search engine farm handing out gift codes for a mobile strategy game. The domain that used to hold most of a million Hungarian photographs now holds keyword filler in English.

The 829,999 private images and the first 50,206 public ones are in the Wayback Machine, retrievable if you know the link. That is a real archive and it is also a cruel one, because an image host's whole purpose is that you do not have to remember the link.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »