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 prive we pay for 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.
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).
Glad to hear it’s a requested feature. It kinda just hit me that it seems empty with no videos or gifs as you scroll. They definitely need to implement an embedded video player instead of links to videos/gifs.
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 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 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/
You can go to/c/kidsbeingderps to see some gifs in action. It’s a new community so there’s not much, but hope it grows. Using Memmy app, I can see the gifs in action as I scroll, similar to Apollo.
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.
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.