This is why I prefer kbin over Lemmy. -- I'm posting this on kbin.social right now.
Kbin honestly looks like a drop replacement for Reddit. If you were not paying attention and had given Kbin the Reddit logo, you could easily mistake this for Reddit. Plus it is further developed along.
At least two Kbin apps are being made right now, the furthest along being Artemis, which is actually both compatible with Lemmy and Kbin. Limited closed beta ongoing right now apparently, opening up to more beta testers soon, I believe.
Still pretty raw and there’s a lot of things that would need to change if people want a more reddit-app like experience. Reporting posts, collapsing comment chains, nsfw designation, automatic image display opt out, etc.
The platform is gaining users and people are implementing changes frequently, so if it continues to grow I’d expect to see a more familiar set of tools appear.
Without native video hosting, a lot of Reddit communities that are video centric (e.g. /r/CombatFootage) are not likely to migrate over here. I find myself missing video content here - it’s a huge weakness of the Lemmy platform in general, and why I believe it will not fully replace Reddit as a thing.
The whole thing is really a bit ironic. Market analysis shows that video content makes users stay longer, so Reddit pushes for more video content. Hosting video content is expensive, so Reddit pushes to make more money off users. Users get fed up and leave.
I guess peertube is the example to look at now for video hosting in the Fediverse. It's a complicated challenge for sure.
Video centric subs existed before Reddit added their own hosting service. Just use a 3rd party service like YouTube. Or setup your own instance and pay for the hosting costs.
Reddit adding video hosting was probably the beginning of the downfall of Reddit. Hosting videos is expensive. So the focus shifted to milking more money out of the users
If those video-heavy communities want to host their own instances and cover the cost of hosting those videos, then that would be cool.
The thing with individual- and community-based hosting, though, is that the hidden costs of the social web become visible very quickly. Those were externalized to the VC backed vultures, and now those vultures are clamping down on us and demanding their fill.
We paid a price for things like free video hosting. Now we're aware of the costs and need to make conscious decisions around it, not friction free ones.
As far as peoples' reputation points are concerned, yes. But of course we're mature, sophisticated kbin users who don't care about such trivial things. Only the unwashed masses on Reddit do that.
I mean, to drift ever further off topic, I actually genuinely believe that reputation points are bad, are part of the dark patterns of corporate social media, and need a total rethink in this space. So yeah, I try not to care about them at the user level.
Still sorting out how I feel about them at the post/comment level, though. Increasingly thinking that downvotes are another dark pattern, encouraging passive-aggressive behaviour rather than thoughtful engagement, and that they should be replaced with a 'hide' button.
IMO, adding native video support was a huge blunder on Reddit's part, and the expense of it is likely a factor in how desperate they are to squeeze money from their users now.
Let Lemmy and Kbin do what they are good at: aggregating links. Let others be good at hosting videos.
If the Web client can eventually be improved to properly embed Vimeo/YouTube/etc links so they can be played inline, that seems like a good enough experience to me. Making a good video player is hard. Reddit's native player sucks and Lemmy/Kbin are open source with even less resources.
Lemmy can already follow PeerTube channels. I'm sure proper support for this will hit kbin soon, too. People can utilize existing PeerTube instances, or set up their own if they'd like to publish videos to the fedi.
One downside of using a 3rd party to host media is when it shuts down like gyfcat will in September, it will result in a lot of broken links with media forever lost.
Self hosting has less chance of losing the media at the cost of having to pay for media storage.
As a new website, I'd definitely prefer kbin or Lemmy to just focus on the core product and not self host media yet.
Using wefwef at the moment (Apollo inspired) you can use it on android desktop and iPhone as it is a webapp and they show up as a link for me that I can then click and doesn’t embed it or inline it.
I’m a bitter old man who dislikes inline gifs in the comments
I've waffled on this issue over the last 25 years, but agree that the option to show/block should still exist.
First I was against it.
Mostly because it was change - cluttering my once pristine BBSs
Then I enjoyed it.
Because it added some liveliness to the threads I read, and because I was in a smaller collective of folks that knew how to do it without being annoying.
Then I was against it again.
Because the forums/boards because overstuffed with people shitposting ONLY animated gifs.
I'm not fond of inline gifs. I overwhelm too easy, and so many gifs are kinda over the top without really adding to the conversation. In my opinion. I'd usually turn them off if I had a choice.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I would do is upload videos to peertube instance (the peertube servers are better equipped for storing videos and most of them are free + offer more or less unlimited storage) and for pictures use plethora or pixelfied. Lemmy and mastodon are just one aspect of the whole fediverse, there’s all sorts of instanced equipped to be all sorts of things <a href="">https://fediverse.info/</a>
I have seen couple videos, one was a drone killing Russian soldiers, other ones were for porn. So it may just be lack of interest, or lack of convenience to share videos.
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