I’ve seen only few GIFs on Lemmy. Most of them are just links but I’ve see a handful that were actually animated within the apps (I forget which app it was maybe Memmy). Is there a reason for the lack of GiFs?

    • darkan15@lemmy.world
      50·
      1 year ago

      An Owl that turns to the camera with a surprised face with the caption 'oh really?'

      For those that don’t know, you can use gifs with the url/link Markdown format like this: ![](https://media.tenor.com/uC2qyrJsT6wAAAAM/oh-really-o-rly.gif)

      Edit: added a description

      Make sure to include a description of it in the square brackets for our visually-impaired friends!

      • artillect@kbin.social
        15·
        1 year ago

        Make sure to include a description of it in the square brackets for our visually-impaired friends!

        • over_clox@lemmy.world
          4·
          1 year ago

          I’m going to try to keep this more in mind in the future. I’ve edited my comments here to include a description.

      • over_clox@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 year ago

        I’m going to test a thing, apologies if it doesn’t work for some users…

        Edit: It’s supposed to be a pug licking the screen clean. MP4 format though, no audio. Works on most Discord communities.

        Edit 2: I added a description for blind users. People in comments are saying it shows up in the web browser, but not yet in the mobile apps.

        A pug breed dog with a white background licking the glass screen clean

    • over_clox@lemmy.world
      26·
      1 year ago

      GIFs have existed since the late 1980s, well before Reddit ever even started. GIFs were partly what made the early internet fun, if not occasionally annoying LOL!

      But yeah, GIFs didn’t ruin Reddit, Spez did…

    • Vilian
      37·
      1 year ago

      gonna be so good if the intances block every .gif to preserve resources, and people is obligated to post using better codecs

      • LazaroFilm@lemmy.worldOP
        14·
        1 year ago

        When I say gif I mean animated image it could be whatever encoding format I don’t care. I’m talking about the short animated image looping format.

      • Izzy@lemmy.world
        72·
        1 year ago

        That doesn’t make a lot of sense. For one people would be hosting the gif on another server than the Lemmy instance. Secondly the Lemmy server isn’t the thing processing the image. Your computer and browser are. Thirdly gifs are way more efficient than any video codec you can imagine by its very nature of not being a compressed video format. It is just a series of images that requires no decoding. The point of a video codec is to make a video more compressed. Not to make its playback efficient.