this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
25 points (76.6% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26682 readers
3202 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics.


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm asking because I saw a few posts in my home feed that I can't verify. By the way, Lemmy can't be compared to Reddit if it doesn't have the ability to post videos or GIFs. Think about it: what good is a social media platform without the ability to share the most popular forms of multimedia?

all 16 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] simple@lemm.ee 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, but you can link to an external video. Unfortunately videos are very taxing on servers (and therefore expensive to deal with), so it's unlikely we'll see them in Lemmy in the near future.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

It's up to the client on how to render them. Most videos I encounter in Lemmy are linked from outside sources or are on YouTube.

  • Lemmy-UI has no or limited support for anything but images.
  • Tesseract is on the other end of the spectrum and supports pretty much every kind of media.
  • Photon supports GIFs and native (mp4, webm) videos.
  • Other UIs and mobile apps, I haven't kept as up-to-date on but are typically somewhere between Lemmy-UI and Photon's level of media support.

Edit: In addition to what clients support, it's also up to each instance admin to define what media they allow to be uploaded. Among the possible configuration options are:

  • Whether to allow any media uploads at all
  • The max size of the media they'll allow users to upload
  • Whether to allow videos or just static images
  • Whether to convert videos to GIFs or static images
  • Whether the media subsystem (pict-rs) can process the upload before the upload request times out. I think that's 10 seconds which limits direct uploads to short videos.

Like others have said, hosting videos is expensive both in areas of storage and bandwidth. Most Lemmy instances are run by volunteers at their cost or operate solely on donations. Admins typically ask users to host those off-server (Imgur, YouTube, Catbox, etc) and restrict what can be uploaded directly to reasonable limits.

[–] AnokLola@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm using voyager on Android and I like it so far, don't want to replace it.

[–] ptz@dubvee.org 8 points 1 year ago

Like I said, it's up to the client on how to handle what's in the post. So you'll not have any media support that Voyager doesn't offer.

[–] willya@lemmyf.uk 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Well you can’t base your ideas about how all of this works on anything if you’re only willing to use one frontend.

[–] AnokLola@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago
[–] dan1101@lemm.ee 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I wouldn't want Lemmy to host videos, they require a lot of storage and bandwidth for a service the users pay nothing for. 60 seconds of video could equal many thousands of text posts and links. I hope Lemmy stays simple.

[–] ShitOnABrick@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I would like for some instances of lemmy in future to consider adding videos prehaps to save on server costs have the videos set to 480p or 720p max this will add an entirely new layer of content to lemmy prehaps said instances and supplement there income with ads and donations

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I posted a .gif in a comment the other day just using the base lemmy.world interface on desktop and it Just Worked. I don't know about other clients/UI's.

[–] TheTetrapod@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

Why is it not good enough to submit a link? I only come to sites like this for the comments, anyway.

[–] KISSmyOS@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

MFW lemmy has no gifs...

[–] theKalash@feddit.ch 0 points 1 year ago

I really hope not.

Luckily hosting videos require quite a lot of resources so it will be too much for many smaller, selfhosted instances, which will hopefully contain the spread of it.