Because you need to meet the platform’s goals.

On a for-profit one, that’s being somehow profitable to it, whether by paying directly or through ads and content placement. Otherwise, you need a philanthropic platform, where either someone or you indirectly supports it, like a P2P one.

Instagram is of the former kind.

$50/month would barely scratch the surface.

Let’s take a conservative approach, and say there are:

• only 1 billion links
• each link only points to a URL of up to 100 characters in length on average (some will be 1000 or longer, but let’s hope some are 50 or shorter)
• less than 10 billion daily hits total (that’s an average of 10/link)
• the response time should be well under 50ms.

Now you’re looking at 100GB of raw data to put into a database, that needs to return 100K answers/second, in less than 50ms each, worldwide, 24/7.

What is your estimated cloud cost for something like 256GB of RAM, 128 cores, 10Gbps connect, replicated across several zones, and 1TB/day outgoing transfer?

That’s only for the redirect responses in read-only mode, nothing else. You will also need some maintenance to keep it 24/7, for when the server catches fire, or gets obsoleted, and when new exploits come up against your software stack.

How much work is it really to keep goo.gl links around?

A lot.

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for links to internal stuff.

Just keeping it running would take some containers of server racks, plus updating the security, accounting for changing web standards, and so on.

Keep in mind this isn’t some self-hosted url shortener with less than a million entries and a peak of 10K users/second, that you can slap onto a random server and keep it going. It’s a multiple orders of magnitude larger beast, requiring a multi-server architecture just to keep the database, plus more of the same for the analytics, admin interface… and users will expect it to return a result in a fraction of a second, worldwide.

Anyone could generate them, for free, and they came with analytics on the side. Google also generated them for sharing content from their services.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_URL_Shortener

URL shorteners in general, or just Google?

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/URLTeam

Goo.gl has a namespace for 10 billion entries, it used to keep tracking/analytics data for each link, with a user interface, and it would happily generate them for stuff like Google Maps links.

How much money would you say it takes to even maintain a system like that, plus update its security, not to mention account for changing web standards, at that scale?

Closest thing to “push-button”, are probably VPNs with a built-in ad blocker… which might as well be a pihole. Not sure what % of people use those.

Zero per cent of app users are running ad blockers

Not to take away from his point, but… Pi-Hole.

Strictly speaking, “Linux” can run on 10MB of RAM or less.

Meanwhile, a single web page may need 100MB or more to build the DOM, run all scripts, and keep a buffer of the canvas.

Wrong question. The right question would be:

Why is AI as used in Lensa’s Magic Avatars App Pornifying Asian Women?

Ask Lensa to remove the “ugly” and similar negative prompts from their avatar generating App, and let’s see what comes out.

https://stable-diffusion-art.com/how-to-use-negative-prompts/#Universal_negative_prompt

For reference, check out how that same negative prompt turns a chubby-ish poorly shaved average guy, into a male pornstar, or a valet into a rich daddy’s boy.