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?

  • wildchandelure
    153•1 year ago

    Lemmy doesn’t really support embedding videos yet. It’s a highly requested feature so i think we can be assured it’ll be here within a future update.

    • @[email protected]
      86•1 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]English
        82•1 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          16•1 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]English
            29•1 year ago

            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.

          • @[email protected]English
            14•1 year ago

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

      • @[email protected]
        9•1 year ago

        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).

        • hitagi (ani.social)English
          10•1 year ago

          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.

          • daspriiEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            ani.social

            I love that lol.

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

            • hitagi (ani.social)English
              1•1 year ago

              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
      • @[email protected]
        8•1 year ago

        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.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•1 year ago

      Glad to hear it’s a requested feature. It kinda just hit me that it seems empty with no videos or gifs as you scroll. They definitely need to implement an embedded video player instead of links to videos/gifs.