No Stupid Questions

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.

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).

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.

You can use a userscript manager like greasymonkey to inject a javascript snippet that will hide images in comments which have obvious urls to gifs and replace them with actual links or hide them

here an example snippet:

(() => {
  let timerID;
  function onChange() {
    Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.comment-node img[src$=".gif"]')).forEach((e) => {
      const src = e.getAttribute('src');
      if (typeof src === 'string' && src.startsWith('http')) {
        e.setAttribute('src', '');
        const a = document.createElement('a');
        a.innerText = 'link to gif';
        a.href = src;
        e.parentNode.appendChild(a);
      }
    });
  }
  // if we have many mution events, wait until the site has settled
  function delayed_onChange() {
	  clearTimeout(timerID);
	  timerID = setTimeout(onChange, 500);
  }
  function init() {
	  // start observer
	  new MutationObserver(delayed_onChange).observe(document.body, {
	    attributes: false,
	    childList: true,
	    subtree: true,
	  });
	  delayed_onChange();
  }
  setTimeout(init, 500);
})();

I'm not aware of an option like that but that sounds like a good feature.

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.

What client are you using? It plays as a GIF on the browser but it might be a still image in a mobile app.

It's a gif for me.

Are you using an app or something that maybe doesn't support it? Or on kbin or something maybe?

Catbox has a FAQ and lists connectivity issues in certain countries like Australia, Ireland/UK, Iran, Afghanistan or users of Comcast and Quad9.

Cat videos?

Hosting videos requires a lot of storage, before reddit hosting images/videos most used services where imgur, streamable, gifycat...

On small instances hosting videos could be an issue with storage and bandwidth, hosting externally is always a best option

But if Lemmy is going to be a serious Reddit replacement, it's going to need to be able to host videos as well.