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?
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It will. Reddit only added video hosting in the past couple years. Before that, everyone just linked imgur and other hosting sites.
I bet the largest servers will eventually have their own hosting platform too, but for now it’s one of the growing pains.
Ironically, reddit did just fine without hosting videos for… Well, like ten years.
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I suspect certain video oriented communities will go elsewhere. /r/combatfootage was my only Reddit video community, so it hasn’t impacted me much.
I’m running !spacemusic@lemmy.ca now which occasionally links to YouTube videos when other sources aren’t easy to find. We will see how that goes.
Probably features will get added over time. Maybe the federated video hosting stuff will take off some day. But from a bandwidth perspective, that might be hard for these volunteer run servers to handle.
Q: why do we need native hosting?
IMO, adding native video support was a huge blunder on Reddit’s part, and the expense of it is likely a factor in how desperate they are to squeeze money from their users now.
Let Lemmy and Kbin do what they are good at: aggregating links. Let others be good at hosting videos.
If the Web client can eventually be improved to properly embed Vimeo/YouTube/etc links so they can be played inline, that seems like a good enough experience to me. Making a good video player is hard. Reddit’s native player sucks and Lemmy/Kbin are open source with even less resources.
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One downside of using a 3rd party to host media is when it shuts down like gyfcat will in September, it will result in a lot of broken links with media forever lost.
Self hosting has less chance of losing the media at the cost of having to pay for media storage.
As a new website, I’d definitely prefer kbin or Lemmy to just focus on the core product and not self host media yet.
Linkrot is also just a fact of life on the internet. Something we probably need to get used to once again.
Lemmy can already follow PeerTube channels. I’m sure proper support for this will hit kbin soon, too. People can utilize existing PeerTube instances, or set up their own if they’d like to publish videos to the fedi.
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If those video-heavy communities want to host their own instances and cover the cost of hosting those videos, then that would be cool.
The thing with individual- and community-based hosting, though, is that the hidden costs of the social web become visible very quickly. Those were externalized to the VC backed vultures, and now those vultures are clamping down on us and demanding their fill.
We paid a price for things like free video hosting. Now we’re aware of the costs and need to make conscious decisions around it, not friction free ones.
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This. I wish I could upvote more than once. Oh wait, I can. Boosts count double.
Huh. Does that mean we can triple upvote?
As far as peoples’ reputation points are concerned, yes. But of course we’re mature, sophisticated kbin users who don’t care about such trivial things. Only the unwashed masses on Reddit do that.
Video centric subs existed before Reddit added their own hosting service. Just use a 3rd party service like YouTube. Or setup your own instance and pay for the hosting costs.
Reddit adding video hosting was probably the beginning of the downfall of Reddit. Hosting videos is expensive. So the focus shifted to milking more money out of the users
Didn’t one of the larger gif sites announce their discontinuation?
Yeah, Gfycat is going away
That’s gonna suck when all those gifs disappear
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.
Why isn’t that a link… Is that a Lemmy thing or an instance thing or an app thing? These tiny UX friction points are important for retention.
Sorry, I made a typo in the link. It should work now.
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.
Doesn’t need to be hosted on the server. Just need the client’s to support smooth embedding from other video hosts like peertube.
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 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.
I would say it reminds me of Reddit circa 2010. It’s still pretty rough around the edges but it’s also the most fun I’ve had on the Internet in years.
Unfortunately it looks like Lemmy is going to get all the mobile apps, though.
It’s harder to make apps for kbin right now, but that will change in hopefully a month or so
Kbin is newer and the dev, Ernest, is getting more help from the community now that its growth has exploded
https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/127572/Ernest-Appreciation-Post
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.
Gifs in the comments? Nice.
Is there a setting to disable gifs and other images in comments? Or at least minimize them so I have to click before they appear?
Still pretty raw and there’s a lot of things that would need to change if people want a more reddit-app like experience. Reporting posts, collapsing comment chains, nsfw designation, automatic image display opt out, etc.
The platform is gaining users and people are implementing changes frequently, so if it continues to grow I’d expect to see a more familiar set of tools appear.
