[smaps]

Cloud storage is expensive, I’m willing to bet that’s a lot of money saved at their scale.

[insanitybit]

Maintaining a massive scale infra with the same availability and durability as S3 is really expensive. It's possible but hard.

[kalleboo]

But do you need S3 durability for meme gifs that will be seen once and then just waste disk space for decades?

[johannes1234321]

At least temporarily old images weren't available and some people cared: https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/08/19/twitter-de...

[kalleboo]

There's a difference between "all images" and "one in 100 million images"

S3 durability is "for every ten million objects stored, you can expect to incur an average loss of a single object once every 10,000 years". They could drop the durability by probably 5 9's and nobody would even notice.

[insanitybit]

Maybe not, but you could switch to single-zone S3 in that case and cut your costs down ~70%.

Migrating storage off of cloud is just really hard.