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?

  • MajesticFlame@lemmy.one
    2·
    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 price we pay for freedom and no ads. You have to link videos.

    • 312@lemm.eeEnglish
      2·
      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.

      • trifictional@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        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.

        • 312@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          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.