Ever since I started out here 9 Months ago, there has been nothing more confusing then getting GIFs and Videos to display properly.
I’ve tried hosting them on lemmy.blahaj.zone, Ingur, Imgflip and some free hosting sites yet non seem consistent enough across all apps/sites.
I myself use Boost for lemmy, if it loads just good for me it loads for no one else. If it doesnt load for me it works for some others. sometimes it doesnt work for anyone or me. Sometimes it links to a side directly. Sometimes it does 3 really cool flips in the air and gives up after. sometimes using the same hosts yields 2 different Results, like the last 2 GIFs I uploaded and hosted on Imgflip. Its just so inconsistent.
At this point I don’t know. So Tl:Dr: What image hosting side work for most people in displaying videos and gifs on most apps?
One of the reasons it’s inconsistent is that Lemmy tries to balance the media it serves locally vs. the media it lets remote hosts serve. Also it’s a bit naïve about image conversion. So if you link to an actual GIF at giphy.com (for example), it works consistently across the most the most platforms if Lemmy leaves it alone. If it doesn’t, it’ll bring it in and convert it to a WebM file, which not all clients know what to do with. Even if they do though, looping isn’t always on by default for video, so the effect of a GIF that relies on looping might be nullified.
It’s probably best to focus on the clients with the biggest user-base, rather than try to target them all. For lemmy.world/c/gifs, the most popular posts have been uploaded to imgur.com - which convert most GIFs to MP4s - and the post’s author has linked to the inline version at i.imgur.com.