Video is simply the most superior type of media there is

Fixed speed, unskimmable, with an inherent bias towards aesthetics over content?

No thanks...

I mean, yeah, it would be nice to have it, but it will never be the right media for everything/everyone.

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is

I really don't get this. There's totally some cool stuff on youtube, but I really dislike when someone points me to a video for more information on a topic. Especially if the presenter has "content creator" affectation.

Scanning text is easier and faster.

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is

Fuck that noise

Possibly that many here are here for a more text based experience and don't see it as a problem.

Why is there a lack of gifs/videos on Lemmy?

Lemmy's internal data performance is so horribly slow and crash-causing that I think the last thing they want is even more popular data.

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

Video is more data, popularity is more data. For whatever reason, at every turn, I've seen developers turn away from scaling options like Memcache, Redis, or just abandoning ORM data management and rewriting the data interfaces by hand....

since the sites on which the videos are hosted can track you.

That's already true for images that are hot linked routinely, so I don't think video really changes it.

I've been baffled since June why data and fixing lemmy's data coding hasn't been front and center. It's pretty wild to witness so many come to Lemmy and then turn away... Elon Musk has been flocking people, Reddit, etc. It's as if the project wants to make code that won't work on any data. It's baffeling.

Video hosting is very expensive. Not only does it consume so much disk space, it's difficult to transcode these videos. It needs a lot of CPU power or a capable iGPU/GPU which most instances probably don't have. I would love to have short videos on Lemmy but I'm hoping there are lots of available encoding options in place so we can fine tune it to fit our hardware.

For now, I think a good solution is video embedding and a better "player" for the front end. I've tried a few apps and I can watch videos from catbox.moe seamlessly with them.

Some instances allow videos and gifs, it’s a matter of it being implemented in the official lemmy code base so it atleast can be an option to turn on.

Some appa also allow youtube embeds, Avelon is one that supports embeds and videos/gifs

The main reason is that no one is posting them and that’s really it. The hosting isn’t the problem as there’s plenty of free third party hosts when the instance doesn’t allow enough space for uploads. Reddit was basically imgur as a host for the longest time.

But we switched from Reddit…Not really known for being privacy friendly… People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.

The fact that people were abused before doesn't mean we have the right to continue abusing them. That's unethical. And that's weird to distringuish people who 'conserned about privacy'. That's people who know how embedded videos can be used to track users, and those who don't know nonetheless deserve privacy online.

Some frontends allow this I think, it might just be a matter of implementing it?

I don't think the reasoning is privacy, because people would instead need to go to the other site where they can be tracked even more easily. I think it just needs to be implemented

Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.

I could not possibly disagree with this more. If it has sound and no subtitles, it is easily the worst type of media for me.

It's interesting to see that Lemmy users are so against the video.
I still stand by my argument that video is the superior type of media. Just because everyone instantly thinks of a shitty YouTube video with a 20 minute intro and filled with ads or a TikTok video of a stupid trend, that doesn't mean that video is bad. I do agree that most video content nowadays is shit, and I also agree that text or text+image posts are much better for a lot of things, especially when you are looking for specific information.

But whatever your opinion about the video is, you cannot deny that video is the most popular medium and the most attractive/addictive one.
I made this post because I keep seeing posts about "Active monthly users dropped..." pretty often on here. Some say that's because of the X reason, some say it's because of the Y reason... Whatever the reason might be, this type of platform needs users, a lot of them.

I think that providing a bit of a doomscroll content through videos wouldn't hurt anyone. The whole point of this type of site is to have communities focused on different things. Many communities that are very popular on the "other site" are basically dead here because video (embedded video posts) support is bad here.

Besides, isn't this a site on which you can choose which communities you follow? So why would people who are against video posts even care if you can simply filter such content if you are not interested in it? A few of those "doomscrollers" might trickle into your niche community tomorrow and make it more popular...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm kind of skeptical about Lemmy's ability to keep the users. So I personally wouldn't mind filtering a few shitpost communities if that means that we get more active users in other communities.

Maybe I'm wrong...

Check out Tesseract.

It supports inline videos and various embeds (Youtube/Invidious/Piped, Spotify, and more).

For me the sync between lemmy and https://joinpeertube.org/ is still not working flawlessly. syncing new posts from peertube to lemmy suddenly stops working. When I force a sync by searching a new post from a subscribed peertube channel through Lemmy, syncing works for a while, and the the problem described above occurs.

I won't even watch the video because I have limited mobile data