I wholeheartedly agree with this. Reddit has been slowly descending into becoming yet another Instagram/TikTok clone. You scroll a never ending front page of videos and pictures, and it gets somewhat overwhelming pretty quickly.

I think this might be the necessary distinction that will make this a unique space different from Reddit. The less doomscrolling I can have in my life, the better.

For now I don’t think it makes sense to federate large media like videos. The storage costs are just too high to replicate this data all over the place.

Luckily, media isn't federated but only stored where it was uploaded ^^

Is Lemmy capable of playing that format of multimedia?

If it isn't, then it will be the biggest downside of fediverse. But I do remember seeing a gif while I was on my PC.

I think so. Kbin user avatars can be animated gifs.

Seems like animated pictures in posts only work if it's in WebP format but in post bodies or comments gif works too. mp4 should be possible in theory but does not play for me. See this test post.

For the apps I doubt it. The native media libraries often lack support for animated images.

Seems to work on kbin. Can upload gifs and images from the comment screen.

IPFS is basically fancy torrents. Pieces of media are accessed by the hash of their content and some metadata. It's neat, because it can be linked as a URL/URI similar to stuff hosted on the regular web. But, and the main website doesn't really make that clear AT ALL, all content is only available for as long as there are people interested in it. You access a file and distribute it to others from then on. After a while, people move on and old data is deleted from their cache, etc. Unless you 'pin' a piece of content and STORE IT YOURSELF, there is no guarantee it will still be available even 5 minutes after you delete it from your device.

In short: The website makes it seem as if IPFS is this big black hole of infinite and immutable storage when it actually is highly fragile. It can be great if used correctly though, for example if instances decide to keep an archive of successful posts and thereby share the load of storage and distribution. But because every IPFS member is also a distributor, the same legal problems that arise from torrent use will rear their heads again. So better not watch movies or browse a sub with illegal bits if they are hosted on IPFS. IPFS is not built for privacy either, but that's a problem many p2p projects have.

Reddit media always worked for me on Android baconreader. It had a few months sprinkled over the last ten or so years where random hosting sites or Reddit hosted media would choke, but it would always fix itself. I'm not sure how much of any of that is the app or the site or what.

This is the first I've heard of Ipfs and that looks VERY exciting...

Fyi Feedback in case you were curious about other people's experience:
On Android chrome kbin app, gif loaded into browser, image scaled to 1x and didn't fill or stretch at all, preloaded on its own fine, had to click play, didn't loop.