One of the only things I find myself missing about reddit is the videos. I’m aware that it’s not really feasible for videos to be hosted on a lemmy instance at the moment, but I’m curious if that might change
I really fucking hope not.
Because it’s a data hog for mobile users, but mostly because it’s intrusive to the browsing experience.
So having an image/thumbnail with a “play” button is intrusive? I can see how some people might find it annoying (or perhaps even intrusive), but we already have embedded images which are exactly the same until pressed.
That’s the only reason why I keep on going back to reddit.
You don’t have to host a video to embed it. YouTube has a video player that can be run on other websites.
Embedded is what you’re looking for I believe, it is currently an imposition (impedance) to host videos on a Lemmy instance.
Wouldn’t it be better to integrate with the existing federated video hosting service? (PeerTube) so basically host videos in PeerTube, link to Lemmy, make the Lemmy UI parse it as a video with a custom player
I’m still pretty new here so i don’t know how that works, but I just want to see the random crazy person or fight video between memes and news stories
Does PeerTube distribute load across instances, like BitTorrent? Or does it assume that the hosting instance has enough bandwidth to support all concurrent users?
I’m going to be honest with you, I have absolutely no idea how it works. And as far as I can see, there are very few instances at the moment.
Though someone smarter than me could probably answer you by checking the source code, or maybe they even have some documentation written already.
PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol for its videos, so it does distribute load with everyone currently watching a video helping distribute it to everyone else. Each instance is its own torrent tracker. I’m not sure how I feel about it, because your IP address is visible to anyone else watching the video also.
It uses WebTorrent for distribution between viewers watching at the same time which can temporarily help with the load on popular videos, but there still needs to be at least one source instance that’s sharing the video “regularly” (for unpopular or old stuff), which ends up having the same bandwidth issues you’d get with any other video platform.