Not everyone uses or has an unlimited internet connection. So when someone posts a link to a page that contains autoplay video, it fucks us over by surprise by sucking our internet credit dry. It is impossible to disable autoplay in either of the two browsers (Chrome & Firefox). Google has been trying for over 10 years to make a disable mechanism for autoplay and so far they cannot handle the job.
I got burnt by this thread, which is not slrplnk.net but it’s an example of a discriminatory nuisance that harms poor people (who likely have bandwidth quotas). It’s also eco-harmful to waste network energy.
Animated GIFs are a similar but complicated problem and should be treated the same. Blocking images does not block animated GIFs, and while it’s possible to automatically stop an animated GIF, it only stops the playing not the fetching.
When I suggest banning “uncautioned” autoplay, I mean to say there is no issue as long as the existence of autoplay is made loud and clear by the author, so thread visitors cannot get burnt by a surprise hit-and-run bandwidth theft.
I would propose one of:
Or give authors their choice of those. I think these would be sufficient social solutions until the Lemmy software evolves to give the author and visitors a way to tag various anti-features such as autoplay, and then even filter timelines on those tags.