I mocked up a better workflow for video in a mastodon mobile app. I'm not a developer, just a mobile user who wants to stay in their fedi app of choice (currently Moshidon) while enjoying multimedia content and not get booted out to a web browser every time I want to watch a video or listen to a podcast. I still have no idea how difficult or feasible it is to actually implement this concept.

I think it's very important for fediverse mobile apps to support audio and video streaming to integrate with platforms like Peertube, Castopod, Bandwagon (once that gets going), etc.

top 9 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

...user who wants to stay in their fedi app of choice (currently Moshidon) while enjoying multimedia content and not get booted out to a web browser every time I want to watch a video

It's for Lemmy rather than Mastodon, but that is basically why I put together Tesseract. It supports a lot of the "big" sources: Youtube (and both Piped and Invidious), Soundcloud, Bandcap, Spotify, Vimeo as well as Odysee, Peertube, and Songlink.

I think it's very important for fediverse mobile apps to support audio and video streaming to integrate with platforms like Peertube, Castopod, Bandwagon (once that gets going), etc.

I've already got Peertube supprt, but I'll definitely look into Castopod to see what, if any, embed API it supports and try to add that in. Same for Bandwagon, like you said, when it gets going. Thanks for that list.

[–] earth_walker 5 points 5 months ago

That's awesome, nice work! I just tried out Tesseract and it seems to work quite well. Feel free to leave some links where people can try it or contribute to the project, if you like.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This looks good but the minimize button is a little too big.

[–] earth_walker 11 points 5 months ago

True. A lot of things could be improved with the design, this is really just to visualize the core concept. I was also thinking a play/pause button on the pinned player would be good.

Getting fancier, maybe double tap on the right of the pinned player to skip forward 15 seconds would be sweet for skipping ad spots, and when you go the original post, the video could be fixed to the top of the page while you scroll into the replies.

[–] Battle_Masker 4 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I get the frustrations of Moshidon. I couldn't save a picture from my mastodon account cause there was no direct download, and it took me like 40 minutes to figure it out, and even then I think I just screencapped and cropped it

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

there was no direct download

...huh? I just opened Moshidon and grabbed the first image that popped up on my timeline.

a screenshot from Moshidon showing a preview of an image with several options, including the download button

[–] earth_walker 2 points 5 months ago

That's funny, my phone is kinda small so I had to scroll that horizontal menu with the download button, over to the right to access that button 😆 Thanks for the screenshot

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Remember to be nice to Moshidon devs (and also other free application devs). AFAIK, the lead developer for moshidon is a teenager, they could do with minimal rant in the void. Cheers!

[–] earth_walker 2 points 5 months ago

I also ran into that issue the other day. Did you file a feature request for that? If you didn't I will. In general though I really like Moshidon. The video player functionality I want is not available in any mastodon client app except for Fedilab technically, but its implementation is still very primitive for now.