Everyone knows what they want to improve in their software. However, I am opening this post to raise awareness on this issue. It’s just a humble request.
As you know, large video subreddits contribute greatly to Reddit reaching a large user base. For example, when you open the homepage, you can see many subreddits such as r/interestingasfuck, r/funny, r/yesyesyesyesno, r/unexpected etc.
Lemmy is Reddit’s alternative for text posts, but unfortunately not for videos at the moment. To fill this gap, I have opened the [email protected] community and shared a few posts. But these videos are inconsistent between applications and UI’s.
For example;
- Voyager can open videos inline without any problems.
- Mlem showing it as URL and opens the browser instead of playing.
- Lemmy default UI is worst. It doesn’t even show the link. You have to click it’s title to see the video but it’s visually not a link. (looks like this one only occurs on mobile)
- Alexandrite shows as a link.
Yes, video hosting is expensive. However, before solutions such as torrents and IPFS, we must ensure that direct videos work smoothly. This is my $0.02 opinion.
Right now I’m torn. I do not want to host videos. Pictures are expensive enough for me. However, I would like to see videos standardized. As you mentioned every ui handles them differently, I’d like to have a standard way that videos are handled. On the backend, something similar to pictrs would be great to enable/disable videos and enforce things like compression, video length, resolution, and more.