this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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[–] simple 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Nope. You can just link to external videos though, I'd suggest Streamable if you need to upload something quick.

[–] Cruxifux 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do they have any plans to add support for video content do you know?

[–] simple 16 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Not sure. I think videos would be very expensive on the servers so I wouldn't expect it anytime soon. For now I hope they'd just add better embedding support so you can watch videos without leaving the website.

[–] danisth 3 points 1 year ago

An integration with peertube would be pretty cool, I could see it happening.

[–] XanXic 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There doesn't seem to be any open PR related to video, and that's where most features are discussed. You could post it as a request and see where the conversation goes.

Logistically though probably not. Unless they keep it super restrictive like 15-25mb per post, and at that point why bother? Since instances have to store their data, adding videos on top of that would be an absolute heap of file size added to the 'cost' of hosting an instance. Depending on how Lemmy would handle sharing the video itself, the hosting server would have an insane amount of network traffic to stream it to users.

Lemmy servers with just images will start having a larger and larger footprint over time. Adding videos would essentially shoot that up like to an exponential level. It might not be a never say never thing but as Lemmy grows network traffic and the size of the data it needs to hold onto will be the choke points. They could work on it and make it something instance users opt into. But considering it'd be super rare someone would want to front the cost to host videos for their server it's probably more likely to make the integration with other video hoster websites better.

[–] simple 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The fediverse doesn't federate videos and images though, they just share the link. Only the instance that got posted on would store the content while other instances would link to that image.

[–] XanXic 3 points 1 year ago

That doesn't seem to be true just from looking at some of the posts on here. Sometimes it's a link to the home instances image and sometimes it's a duplicate on like Lemmy World's server.

I edited my message just in case but it does seem to go either way on linking to another server or making it's own cached copy. The documentation on how Lemmy's implementation of federation works is like two lines in the official docs which is a bit annoying.

[–] kratoz29 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do you mean by quick?

[–] simple 4 points 1 year ago

I mean hassle-free. Just drag and drop the vid and share the link.

[–] Cruxifux 4 points 1 year ago

And if so, how?

[–] _pete_ 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Whilst I get that we might not want hosting video on Lemmy instances, it would be nice if we could get gif / mp4 support for hotlinked videos from Imgur and the like.

Having popped into Reddit for the last few days they do make the feed seem more active compared to static photos and text posts.

[–] Cruxifux 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why wouldn’t we want to host videos on Lemmy?

[–] TurnItOff_OnAgain 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very space intensive. Makes the server costs balloon

[–] Cruxifux 2 points 1 year ago

That’s annoying.