After being purchased by Snapchat, it appears that gfycat has been abandoned.
The Gfycat service is being discontinued. Please save or delete your Gfycat content by visiting https://www.gfycat.com and logging in to your account. After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com
I know nothing technical about how the fediverse works, but I can potentially see a bittorrent-like future for the fediverse, with people contributing spare compute power or bandwidth to the network when they’re online.
torrents worked on a massive scale is because
You can’t expect this from a fedi-powered gyfcat instance