Another One Bites the Dust: The Slow Death of the Free Internet

I was thinking about Flickr the other day. Remember Flickr? For a long time, it was the place for photographers. Not just a hosting service, but a community. You could discover incredible work, get feedback, and simply exist as a creative person without being constantly sold something. It felt like a cornerstone of a golden age of the internet.

Flickr launched in 2004, and for about 14 years, it ran on a simple, honest premise. You got a generous amount of free storage, and in return, they might show you an ad. Fair enough. It was a utility, a public square. It worked.

Then, in 2018, SmugMug bought it, and the walls started closing in. The “free” tier was gutted—limited to a paltry 1,000 photos. Just like that, 14 years of digital goodwill evaporated. What was once a vibrant community hub became just another service demanding a subscription. It’s not even close to free anymore.

This isn’t just a rant about Flickr, though. It’s a symptom of a larger disease. The digital landscape I grew up with is gone. Everything, and I mean everything, is being monetised. Every service wants its monthly pound of flesh. We’ve traded ownership for rental, community for content streams, and freedom for algorithmic feeds designed to keep us angry and engaged. As I wrote back in 2018-12-13-subscription-services-are-costing-you-money, this relentless push to subscriptions is a disaster for personal computing and creativity.

The worst part? There are no real competitors left in photo hosting. Where do you go? The giants—Google, Apple—will happily hold your photos, but they aren’t communities; they’re data silos for their own ecosystems. The golden age is over. The internet is no longer a frontier; it’s a collection of walled gardens, each with an entrance fee.

It’s the same reason I eventually moved this website over to GitHub. Is it a pain in the arse to maintain? Absolutely. But at least it’s mine. I’m not beholden to a company* that could triple its prices or change its terms on a whim just because their shareholders demand it. It’s a small act of defiance. A way of carving out a corner of the web that still feels like my own.

In the end, we pays our money and we makes our choice. It just feels like there are fewer and fewer choices to make.

All photos from Castle Lichtenstein near Stuttgart.

*github is an american company and could indeed screw over the community at any moment