It’s been great 4 days here on fediverse for me. But I started to notice that there is barely any content in form of videos or gifs. Every content is just static in form is images or text. This is what I am really missing here compared to reddit. Is there any particular reason behind it?
For now I don’t think it makes sense to federate large media like videos. The storage costs are just too high to replicate this data all over the place.
The better model I think is to link to content providers with more traditional approach to providing videos. Lemmy is a link aggregator after all, not a media platform.
TBH, I think this was the downfall of Reddit. Reddit had kind of devolved into a cesspit of reactionary videos. Can’t say I miss those, sure it was entertaining, but it forms habits of doom scrolling and at the end of the day, I don’t want it if it takes shitty business models to support such a service.
Lemmy should stay focused on what made Reddit famous: being the front page of the internet, and honest, raw commenting system to hear from the people.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. Reddit has been slowly descending into becoming yet another Instagram/TikTok clone. You scroll a never ending front page of videos and pictures, and it gets somewhat overwhelming pretty quickly.
I think this might be the necessary distinction that will make this a unique space different from Reddit. The less doomscrolling I can have in my life, the better.
It’s true that reddit has got tiktokified but what I want is not that tiktok content. I just want multimedia here on lemmy via any form. Be it from any other instance or embedding media sharing platforms.
Not having videos on fediverse is just plain boring. I always don’t want to interact or read text based content all the time. Sometimes I want to scroll and chill on the videos/gifs which can be informative, funny and so on.
Luckily, media isn’t federated but only stored where it was uploaded ^^
https://media.tenor.com/uC2qyrJsT6wAAAAM/oh-really-o-rly.gif
I have another cool tip for you. You can embed the graphic into your comment when you use markdown formatting. This way
![](https://media.tenor.com/uC2qyrJsT6wAAAAM/oh-really-o-rly.gif)
becomes this:I’m on the android chrome kbin app, annnnnd i think you meant to embed that? But lol… For me it’s the literal exact same bluetext hotlink
Oh well, in Lemmy this works fine ^^
Are you using a mobile app?
Both, mobile and web app.
Since it sounds like you have auto media preview turned off, just tap that little icon to the left of the link, and you’ll see the image load below the link.
Oooooo… Yes that’s it. Thank you. That’s a good protip. I’m assuming that’s a setting that I probably turned off while trying to make the the All page be more compact.
Edit: I don’t know where that setting is. It’s not in my profile settings.
Here’s where you go to do it
My God. Multiple times I’ve been on that screen in the past. But every time, I’ll have no idea how I got there. I’ve tried to get back, but the best I had was on a magazine’s page at the very bottom.
Thank you for showing this.
My opinion? This is AWFUL design. That a second settings button is THERE is unbelievable. Maybe I’m not hip to how the fediverse exactly works, but this doesn’t feel like the right route to that stuff.
On Lemmy that is. Kbin I believe replicates everything (unless I set my server up wrong). My server at the moment pulls in around 1.5 GB a day it seems. There is a pull request open on the kbin git repo for a feature to auto-remove old media. Personally I’d like the ability to turn on/off media replication. If an instance wants a complete copy in case of defederation/disconnection somehow, they can opt in and mirror all media that comes in. Most servers should just link to the original image source on the originating instance though.