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?
It will. Reddit only added video hosting in the past couple years. Before that, everyone just linked imgur and other hosting sites.
I bet the largest servers will eventually have their own hosting platform too, but for now it’s one of the growing pains.
Hosting videos requires a lot of storage, before reddit hosting images/videos most used services where imgur, streamable, gifycat…
On small instances hosting videos could be an issue with storage and bandwidth, hosting externally is always a best option
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.
Ironically, reddit did just fine without hosting videos for… Well, like ten years.
I suspect certain video oriented communities will go elsewhere. /r/combatfootage was my only Reddit video community, so it hasn’t impacted me much.
I’m running !spacemusic@lemmy.ca now which occasionally links to YouTube videos when other sources aren’t easy to find. We will see how that goes.
Probably features will get added over time. Maybe the federated video hosting stuff will take off some day. But from a bandwidth perspective, that might be hard for these volunteer run servers to handle.
Who says Lemmy should/must/has to be a “serious Reddit replacement?”
Who decides on what features it needs to be a “serious Reddit replacement?”
It has already replaced Reddit for me with it’s current feature set (I’m just waiting for my GDPR export to go through to bail out from there),
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.
This. I wish I could upvote more than once. Oh wait, I can. Boosts count double.
Q: why do we need native hosting?
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.
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.
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
