Where are all the videos and gifs?

sneezelord@lemmy.world to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 216 points –

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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GIFs work. At least in the comments they do. Videos can be (somewhat) embedded if you use an external host (i.e. catbox).

GIF sample:

I'm a bitter old man who dislikes inline gifs in the comments, is there a way to block it like I did with RES on Reddit?

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);
})();

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

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.

It's not a gif for me, just a still image.

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

I dunno what it is with catbox but nothing from there ever loads for me.

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

They block some countries. I'm in Indonesia and I can't open catbox too without using VPN.

When people say "gifs" nowadays they don't mean actual .gif files, .gif files are very outdated and barely used at this point.

Gif has just become the term for short videos without sound

I think actual .GIF files are still used but oftentimes they're just converted to .WEBM's without sound.