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?
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.
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
Why is it not good enough to submit a link? I only come to sites like this for the comments, anyway.
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.
https://catbox.moe/ is my usual choice
MFW lemmy has no gifs…
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.
I’m using voyager on Android and I like it so far, don’t want to replace it.
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.
Well you can’t base your ideas about how all of this works on anything if you’re only willing to use one frontend.
Yeah sure
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.
