I partially know the answer to this question…You cannot host videos directly on Lemmy, but that is understandable, video hosting is pretty expensive, but Lemmy also doesn’t support video embeds(videos don’t play within Lemmy), which means that you will have to open the link in a new tab/window to watch it. Which is pretty annoying/inconvenient, and that is probably the main reason why video/gif posts are just not popular here. Even if someone does post it, users mostly can’t be bothered to open it.

I’ve read somewhere that this is intentional and that is “privacy and security matter”. But that kind of doesn’t make sense to me. Alright, I understand how it can be a privacy concern, since the sites on which the videos are hosted can track you. But we switched from Reddit…Not really known for being privacy friendly… People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.

I’m not knowledgable enough to understand how it can be a security matter. I guess if the video is hosted on a malicious site…But wouldn’t that be easily solved by simply allowing only trusted, well known sites?

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

Are there any other reasons why we don’t see video posts on Lemmy, and are there any plans to make videos more easily consumable on Lemmy?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      I agree for the most part, but prefer video to animated images mostly because of file sizes (only applicable to longer videos). And I prefer audio for many things, like podcasts and audiobooks because I frequently listen at work or while doing chores around the house. I would miss things on screen with video, so forcing audio means the creator will likely describe instead of show things.

      It really depends on the media though. For things on lemmy, I’m mostly looking for text and maybe images, and I ignore pretty much everything else. Then again, I mostly use it for keeping tabs on technical content, and discussion things that don’t really benefit from putting a ton of effort into production value (e.g. I want broad opinions on something, not a well researched exposé).

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          I prefer text too, but I can’t exactly read while driving, working in the yard, or exercising. So I’m glad those options exist, but my listening comprehension is much worse than my reading comprehension, probably because it’s just harder to do back and reprocess something.

          So audio allows me to multitask, text and video don’t.

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    361·
    1 year ago

    Video is simply the most superior type of media there is

    Fixed speed, unskimmable, with an inherent bias towards aesthetics over content?

    No thanks…

    I mean, yeah, it would be nice to have it, but it will never be the right media for everything/everyone.

    • bionicjoey@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      1 year ago

      Okay but remember to smash that Like button, subscribe, and buy some scammy VPN with my affiliate link

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Nah, I don’t think it would be nice to have, because then we’d have even more low effort posts.

      Instead of that, I’d like to have more text-only communities. Text requires much more effort than posting a meme, linking a YouTube video, etc.

  • wahming@monyet.ccEnglish
    27·
    1 year ago

    Video is simply the most superior type of media there is

    Fuck that noise

  • Pons_Aelius@kbin.social
    233·
    1 year ago

    Possibly that many here are here for a more text based experience and don’t see it as a problem.

    • Carnelian@lemmy.worldEnglish
      101·
      1 year ago

      Me lol

      I don’t really browse much when I’m in a comfortable place to watch a video. Occasionally might save a video post and pull it up later if it seems really interesting. Did that today with some of the game trailers that dropped

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        I don’t see why they can’t just host it somewhere else and link to it. It’s not hard to click through.

        I think hosting images here was a mistake, lemmy should be text only, with markup to allow linking to other forms of content.

  • RoundSparrow@lemmy.mlEnglish
    224·
    1 year ago

    Why is there a lack of gifs/videos on Lemmy?

    Lemmy’s internal data performance is so horribly slow and crash-causing that I think the last thing they want is even more popular data.

    Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

    Video is more data, popularity is more data. For whatever reason, at every turn, I’ve seen developers turn away from scaling options like Memcache, Redis, or just abandoning ORM data management and rewriting the data interfaces by hand…

    since the sites on which the videos are hosted can track you.

    That’s already true for images that are hot linked routinely, so I don’t think video really changes it.

    I’ve been baffled since June why data and fixing lemmy’s data coding hasn’t been front and center. It’s pretty wild to witness so many come to Lemmy and then turn away… Elon Musk has been flocking people, Reddit, etc. It’s as if the project wants to make code that won’t work on any data. It’s baffeling.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.techEnglish
      10·
      1 year ago

      Yeah I see op just casually skipping over the largest issue. People can’t afford to host video on Lemmy, and I don’t see a ton of people lining up to donate. Even if they add it, I’d hope it’d be configable to turn off. I don’t need people uploading 4k videos to my instance constantly. Both storage and compute would be off the charts

  • hitagi@ani.socialEnglish
    101·
    1 year ago

    Video hosting is very expensive. Not only does it consume so much disk space, it’s difficult to transcode these videos. It needs a lot of CPU power or a capable iGPU/GPU which most instances probably don’t have. I would love to have short videos on Lemmy but I’m hoping there are lots of available encoding options in place so we can fine tune it to fit our hardware.

    For now, I think a good solution is video embedding and a better “player” for the front end. I’ve tried a few apps and I can watch videos from catbox.moe seamlessly with them.

  • Nix@merv.newsEnglish
    91·
    1 year ago

    Some instances allow videos and gifs, it’s a matter of it being implemented in the official lemmy code base so it atleast can be an option to turn on.

    Some appa also allow youtube embeds, Avelon is one that supports embeds and videos/gifs

  • willya@lemmyf.ukEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    The main reason is that no one is posting them and that’s really it. The hosting isn’t the problem as there’s plenty of free third party hosts when the instance doesn’t allow enough space for uploads. Reddit was basically imgur as a host for the longest time.

  • Otter@lemmy.caEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    Some frontends allow this I think, it might just be a matter of implementing it?

    I don’t think the reasoning is privacy, because people would instead need to go to the other site where they can be tracked even more easily. I think it just needs to be implemented

    • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I don’t think the reasoning is privacy, because people would instead need to go to the other site where they can be tracked even more easily.

      When you go to a privacy-hostile website via a link, you know what you’re doing. But with embedded videos you can be easily deceived to open a link before you learn it’s hosted on an unethical website.

  • Lucia [she/her]@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    6·
    1 year ago

    But we switched from Reddit…Not really known for being privacy friendly… People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.

    The fact that people were abused before doesn’t mean we have the right to continue abusing them. That’s unethical. And that’s weird to distringuish people who ‘conserned about privacy’. That’s people who know how embedded videos can be used to track users, and those who don’t know nonetheless deserve privacy online.

  • Dandroid@dandroid.appEnglish
    61·
    1 year ago

    Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

    I could not possibly disagree with this more. If it has sound and no subtitles, it is easily the worst type of media for me.

    • Wistful@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll try it out. Currently using Alexandrite, it doesn’t even support imgur embeds…

      • Admiral Patrick@dubvee.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Awesome. I just pushed up the latest release with a few features people had requested earlier today. 1.2.58.1 is current but 1.2.59 is building in GitHub workflow. Should be ready to pull in ~20 minutes or so.

  • Wistful@discuss.tchncs.deOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s interesting to see that Lemmy users are so against the video.
    I still stand by my argument that video is the superior type of media. Just because everyone instantly thinks of a shitty YouTube video with a 20 minute intro and filled with ads or a TikTok video of a stupid trend, that doesn’t mean that video is bad. I do agree that most video content nowadays is shit, and I also agree that text or text+image posts are much better for a lot of things, especially when you are looking for specific information.

    But whatever your opinion about the video is, you cannot deny that video is the most popular medium and the most attractive/addictive one.
    I made this post because I keep seeing posts about “Active monthly users dropped…” pretty often on here. Some say that’s because of the X reason, some say it’s because of the Y reason… Whatever the reason might be, this type of platform needs users, a lot of them.

    I think that providing a bit of a doomscroll content through videos wouldn’t hurt anyone. The whole point of this type of site is to have communities focused on different things. Many communities that are very popular on the “other site” are basically dead here because video (embedded video posts) support is bad here.

    Besides, isn’t this a site on which you can choose which communities you follow? So why would people who are against video posts even care if you can simply filter such content if you are not interested in it? A few of those “doomscrollers” might trickle into your niche community tomorrow and make it more popular…

    I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m kind of skeptical about Lemmy’s ability to keep the users. So I personally wouldn’t mind filtering a few shitpost communities if that means that we get more active users in other communities.

    Maybe I’m wrong…

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Wouldn’t it be better to make a different service that replicates the experience of TikTok or whatever?

      PeerTube is a federated video hosting service, so maybe you could build a bridge or something to it like we have worth Mastodon and kbin.

  • Jonny@lemmy.rimkus.itEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    For me the sync between lemmy and https://joinpeertube.org/ is still not working flawlessly. syncing new posts from peertube to lemmy suddenly stops working. When I force a sync by searching a new post from a subscribed peertube channel through Lemmy, syncing works for a while, and the the problem described above occurs.