I’ve been trying to post gifs, but the experience changes from mobile to desktop. Sometimes it appears and plays properly, sometimes it doesnt. Is there a best-practice that I should get used to for formatting, or is there a reliable image hoster that supports it in a way thats compatible with Lemmy?

I just want to share tha spinning mouse dammit

  • @chaoraceEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    The frustrating answer is that each frontend will handle animated images differently, so you just kind of have to cope with that.

    On the desktop website, there are two options to get animation working:

    • Post a video format like webm instead – upside: just works downside: doesn’t loop
    • Do a text-post with only the animated image – upside: loops, supports alt-text downside: worse mobile experience
      • @chaoraceEnglish
        2•1 year ago

        It didn’t work when I tried it: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/853240

        If you inspect the source, you can see that a PNG thumbnail was automatically extracted from the webp and used for the expando image, even though the link source points to an animated webp.

        • PyroEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          Strange, I’ve posted animated WebPs (on another account) and they worked as you’d expect. Perhaps it’s a setting or some other kind of version difference between instances?

          • @chaoraceEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Well, it’s not a frontend thing as far as I can tell because the expando also uses the thumbnail image when viewed on lemmy.world. I’m aware of some instances (e.g.: blind, lemmynsfw, etc.) that use a forked UI which might explain the discrepancy – is it possible that the post you’re referring to was hosted on one of those?

            Otherwise, there’s something going on at thumbnail creation time, possibly a bug, which I’d like to research further. Could you share an example post where the expando image was an animated webp? It doesn’t have to be one of your own posts, of course, assuming you’re worried about creating a papertrail to your alt account.

            • PyroEnglish
              2•1 year ago

              I’ve just posted a WebP to a random test community I found: https://lemmy.world/post/1486008

              For me, I can see it animated in the thumbnail and the expanded post both on lemmy.world and the mobile apps I use (Voyager/wefwef, and Liftoff).

              • @chaoraceEnglish
                3•1 year ago

                Interesting! I tried uploading the same image and it became static (link). I think that seals it – definitely a backend issue. The question remains as to why that’s happening, but it’s definitely tied to something about the configuration of the user’s home instance. Credit where it’s due: exactly as you’ve suggested

                • PyroEnglish
                  3•1 year ago

                  Your image appears static for me too!

                  Credit where it’s due

                  I’m a developer by trade, we tend to have relatively accurate hunches about these things haha
                  Hopefully this is something that can be fixed (or at least toggled per-user) soon.