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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Quite possibly not. Remember that the admins running lemmy instances have very limited revenue so paying for servers is an issue. Some instances even encourage posting links instead of images to save on cost.

Videos are in a league of their own when it comes to size and therefore the server power needed. Lemmy probably can't afford it. Its the prive we pay for no ads. You have to link videos.

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.

But that’s not really a feature of Lemmy itself, but the program reading it.

For example, if I’m using a Lemmy app on my iPhone and I see a post with a YouTube link, the app is the one that needs to implement this embedded view feature.

Yes, but I assume the OP is referring to lemmy-ui, which is the built-in frontend for desktop and mobile in the browser, which does not at this point support dynamic conversion of youtube links to embed cards AFAIK. App support of embeds will obviously be on a app-to-app basis.

Lemmy does serve up its own UI which reads itself and that UI doesn't support embedding videos.

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.

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).

I wouldn’t mind if it also compressed attached pictures to save on storage and bandwidth

It already does depending on the instance configuration. In my instance, all images are converted to WEBP and downscaled to 1000 pixels max either side.

ani.social

I love that lol.

Is there somewhere in the docs that explains how to configure your instance to compress images like that?

ani.social

I love that lol.

hehe

Is there somewhere in the docs that explains how to configure your instance to compress images like that?

The Lemmy docs are kind of lacking admittedly but you can configure image compression through pict-rs. You can find all the environment variables you can use here.

My docker-compose.yml file includes this:

pictrs:
    image: asonix/pictrs:0.4.0-rc.9-linux-arm64v8
    environment:
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__PREPROCESS_STEPS=resize=1000
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__MAX_FILE_SIZE=8
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__MAX_WIDTH=10000
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__MAX_HEIGHT=10000
      - PICTRS__MEDIA__FORMAT=webp

Huh. Good point. I kinda assumed differently. I have no doubt it's heavily requested tho. Guess things just wont be as convenient.