Redditors are no stranger to what may outwardly seem to be pointless collaborative projects. In fact, that's kind of their specialty. Earlier this year, the Place project saw thousands of users come together to draw on a giant digital canvas, but at around the same time the folks over at r/DataHoarder , a community of self-described "digital librarians," were planting the seeds for something far larger—in principle anyway.

The idea was to create a distributed archive of all of Instagram. This would require ripping every picture from every public (and many private) accounts and storing them on spare hard drives and rented space in the cloud. The total size of this archive when it's finished is uncertain, but tens of millions of photos are uploaded to the platform every day, accounting for what is likely petabytes worth of data. After eight months of work, the group has archived nearly 600 terabytes of Instagram posts—nothing to bat an eye at, but a mere drop in the bucket of the total collection of all Instagram posts.

So why go to all this trouble to collect and store random people's photos? According to the archive's creators, the answer is basically 'because they're there.' But the project may also one day be of great value to historians, and may find practical use in the present as a way of preventing identity theft online—assuming Instagram doesn't manage to shut it down first.

The idea to create a distributed Instagram archive was originally posted to r/DataHoarder on January 5 by one of the subreddit's moderators, -Archivist. His real name is John (he wouldn't give his last name), he's in his late twenties, and as he told me over email, when he's not archiving Instagram, he's "archiving something else." Although John has worked on more formal archival efforts both IRL and online with Archive Team, most of his time as a digital librarian these days is dedicated to passion projects he posts to r/DataHoarder.

"So now I have 300 TB of other people's pictures, but what do I do with them?"

"My initial motivation for the Instagram archive was because nobody else was doing this," John told me over email. "I didn't start with any particular reasoning in mind or ideas as to what I'd go on to do with the collected data."