Hey are there no GIF on Lemmy?

LazaroFilm@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 83 points –

I’ve seen only few GIFs on Lemmy. Most of them are just links but I’ve see a handful that were actually animated within the apps (I forget which app it was maybe Memmy). Is there a reason for the lack of GiFs?

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Because Lemmy hasn't been ruined quite yet

An Owl that turns to the camera with a surprised face with the caption 'oh really?'

For those that don't know, you can use gifs with the url/link Markdown format like this: ![](https://media.tenor.com/uC2qyrJsT6wAAAAM/oh-really-o-rly.gif)

Edit: added a description

Make sure to include a description of it in the square brackets for our visually-impaired friends!

Make sure to include a description of it in the square brackets for our visually-impaired friends!

I'm going to try to keep this more in mind in the future. I've edited my comments here to include a description.

I'm going to test a thing, apologies if it doesn't work for some users...

Edit: It's supposed to be a pug licking the screen clean. MP4 format though, no audio. Works on most Discord communities.

Edit 2: I added a description for blind users. People in comments are saying it shows up in the web browser, but not yet in the mobile apps.

A pug breed dog with a white background licking the glass screen clean

I'm probably an idiot for clicking a random tinyurl link someone posted, but it didn't work for me in either the image preview or opening the link (on an Android phone)

Interesting. I found myself having difficulty retrieving the full link myself, but I guarantee it's an innocent silly link.

Lemme try again with the full link...

A pug breed dog with a white background licking the glass screen clean

Doesn't open inline for me, but I'm also viewing this from kbin.social so there might be embedding issues

GIFs have existed since the late 1980s, well before Reddit ever even started. GIFs were partly what made the early internet fun, if not occasionally annoying LOL!

But yeah, GIFs didn't ruin Reddit, Spez did...

gonna be so good if the intances block every .gif to preserve resources, and people is obligated to post using better codecs

When I say gif I mean animated image it could be whatever encoding format I don’t care. I’m talking about the short animated image looping format.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. For one people would be hosting the gif on another server than the Lemmy instance. Secondly the Lemmy server isn't the thing processing the image. Your computer and browser are. Thirdly gifs are way more efficient than any video codec you can imagine by its very nature of not being a compressed video format. It is just a series of images that requires no decoding. The point of a video codec is to make a video more compressed. Not to make its playback efficient.