I’ve noticed that on Lemmy there aren’t really any videos/gifs as I scroll. I just see post titles, links, or images.
Is there a reason videos and gifs aren’t showing up on my feed?
Lemmy doesn’t really support embedding videos yet. It’s a highly requested feature so i think we can be assured it’ll be here within a future update.
Quite possibly not. Remember that the admins running lemmy instances have very limited revenue so paying for servers is an issue. Some instances even encourage posting links instead of images to save on cost.
Videos are in a league of their own when it comes to size and therefore the server power needed. Lemmy probably can’t afford it. Its the price we pay for freedom and no ads. You have to link videos.
Embedding videos doesn’t require local storage of videos. When you embed a YouTube video, you’re just linking a container which loads and displays the video from YouTube’s servers.
But that’s not really a feature of Lemmy itself, but the program reading it.
For example, if I’m using a Lemmy app on my iPhone and I see a post with a YouTube link, the app is the one that needs to implement this embedded view feature.
Yes, but I assume the OP is referring to lemmy-ui, which is the built-in frontend for desktop and mobile in the browser, which does not at this point support dynamic conversion of youtube links to embed cards AFAIK. App support of embeds will obviously be on a app-to-app basis.
Lemmy does serve up its own UI which reads itself and that UI doesn’t support embedding videos.
Ah I see, I’ve only been using it from wefwef so far.
Yeah, my instance has a 100kb file size limit on images and recommends posting links as well. Not sure how that’s gonna play out long term. With sites like gfycat shutting down and nuking their content, I wonder if we’re exiting the era of free hosting and sharing as well.
I’m not sure if Lemmy already does it or not but I wouldn’t mind if it also compressed attached pictures to save on storage and bandwidth like some other forums does (eg compress picture to <1mb).
I wouldn’t mind if it also compressed attached pictures to save on storage and bandwidth
It already does depending on the instance configuration. In my instance, all images are converted to WEBP and downscaled to 1000 pixels max either side.
GIFs work. At least in the comments they do. Videos can be (somewhat) embedded if you use an external host (i.e. catbox).
GIF sample:
I’m a bitter old man who dislikes inline gifs in the comments, is there a way to block it like I did with RES on Reddit?
Using wefwef at the moment (Apollo inspired) you can use it on android desktop and iPhone as it is a webapp and they show up as a link for me that I can then click and doesn’t embed it or inline it.
I’m a bitter old man who dislikes inline gifs in the comments
I’ve waffled on this issue over the last 25 years, but agree that the option to show/block should still exist.
First I was against it.
- Mostly because it was change - cluttering my once pristine BBSs
Then I enjoyed it.
- Because it added some liveliness to the threads I read, and because I was in a smaller collective of folks that knew how to do it without being annoying.
Then I was against it again.
- Because the forums/boards because overstuffed with people shitposting ONLY animated gifs.
I’m not aware of an option like that but that sounds like a good feature.
When people say “gifs” nowadays they don’t mean actual .gif files, .gif files are very outdated and barely used at this point.
Gif has just become the term for short videos without sound
Didn’t one of the larger gif sites announce their discontinuation?
I’ve always hated reddit hosted videos, the performance was terrible. A link to youtube was always so much faster. I guess it made sense for subreddits that focused on video content, but I never cared about any of those.
I’ve always hated reddit hosted videos, the performance was terrible.
Me too! And they never had any sound when I maximized them. It was awful!
I’m waiting for
- Instant Regret
- What could go wrong (it’s there but not much input)
- Damn that’s interesting
- Public Freakout
Or some funny fail videos
Be the change you want to see
What I would do is upload videos to peertube instance (the peertube servers are better equipped for storing videos and most of them are free + offer more or less unlimited storage) and for pictures use plethora or pixelfied. Lemmy and mastodon are just one aspect of the whole fediverse, there’s all sorts of instanced equipped to be all sorts of things https://fediverse.info/
I have seen couple videos, one was a drone killing Russian soldiers, other ones were for porn. So it may just be lack of interest, or lack of convenience to share videos.
What more can you need?
Cat videos?
This is why I prefer kbin over Lemmy. – I’m posting this on kbin.social right now.
Kbin honestly looks like a drop replacement for Reddit. If you were not paying attention and had given Kbin the Reddit logo, you could easily mistake this for Reddit. Plus it is further developed along.
Except for the ability to sort by top.
It’s because the Top is judged by the amount of boosts, not the favorites or upvotes.
