In RIF, any time someone posted a YouTube video or a GIF from various GIF hosting sites, that was displayed directly in the feed, rather than needing to open the link. For articles, it would also choose an image from the article and embed that in the feed, so you could quickly get a sense of what the article was about as you were scrolling.
This is what I'm missing the most from RIF, more so than any button or setting, because it IS the core experience of browsing content in the app. It would open up Lemmy to a whole world of dynamic content, rather than just images and text posts.
I'm guessing this is also one of the more time consuming features to implement, and to that I say—devs, I don't have the skills to help you with this, but I will pay you for it. Right now, it's a barrier to fully enjoying Lemmy as much as Reddit, and I want to stick it to Reddit that badly. DM me if you're interested.
PS: All this is built on the assumption that this is a client-side problem. If it's not, I'll welcome a correction.
It’s a good mix of a client and server-side issue—I’m working on this in my client at the moment. The article images are already provided by Lemmy instances, so that‘s no problem to implement. When it comes to video, that’s gonna be a harder challenge to tackle. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc. all have their own dedicated and high-powered services that handle and process video to give it the ability to preload and instant-play. Lemmy does not store videos that are linked currently, and it’s tough trying to implement video support when all you’re given is a foreign link that tells you nothing about the video. If it’s a huge video, it might take far too long to load. And when it comes to YouTube, Vimeo, and other services, the only way to embed the video is using their own player on the website, bringing up huge privacy concerns.
That said, It’ll be fun to tackle the problem, and maybe down the road Lemmy devs can find a server-side solution that will speed things up and maybe preprocess video links or something. It’s only up from here!