@sarajw that's certainly true, but if I upload a file I think it's worth ensuring that the format remains the same, because if I want to download it and repost it elsewhere, I get a video, and other applications typically treat videos differently by not looping them, whereas animated GIFs are looped. Thus, there's two possible solutions in my view:
Only display videos (since you're absolutely right that GIFs aren't exactly the most lean format), but allow users to download the original GIFs with the usual Right Click -> Save Image As (not sure how difficult this would be to implement)
Just use the same file format that the original uploaded file is, even if the site will still compress it.
There may be some other solutions out there as well, but I'm not sure exactly what those would be.
@ch0ccyra1n some of the responses I got to my quote were really interesting, did you have a chance to look?
I totally get it - but also maybe keep those files you want to reuse somewhere which is more like file storage. The amount of times I've made myself a draft email with a file on it just to access it from elsewhere is kind of dumb, but it works for me 😅
Like, I want my instance (hi @mods! Thanks for everything you do!) not to have to pay a metric assload of cash to host a bunch of reaction GIFs in original format.
So it's cool with me if mastodon automatically transcodes them, to save space.
@sarajw@ch0ccyra1n yea, often videos are smaller than gifs. Though I guess it’s more the portability, copying and dropping a video into a page isn’t as easy as a gif
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