I partially know the answer to this question…You cannot host videos directly on Lemmy, but that is understandable, video hosting is pretty expensive, but Lemmy also doesn’t support video embeds(videos don’t play within Lemmy), which means that you will have to open the link in a new tab/window to watch it. Which is pretty annoying/inconvenient, and that is probably the main reason why video/gif posts are just not popular here. Even if someone does post it, users mostly can’t be bothered to open it.
I’ve read somewhere that this is intentional and that is “privacy and security matter”. But that kind of doesn’t make sense to me. Alright, I understand how it can be a privacy concern, since the sites on which the videos are hosted can track you. But we switched from Reddit…Not really known for being privacy friendly… People that are concerned about their privacy will know what to do/not to do.
I’m not knowledgable enough to understand how it can be a security matter. I guess if the video is hosted on a malicious site…But wouldn’t that be easily solved by simply allowing only trusted, well known sites?
Video is simply the most superior type of media there is, and I think that not having easy access to it on Lemmy is hurting it.
Are there any other reasons why we don’t see video posts on Lemmy, and are there any plans to make videos more easily consumable on Lemmy?
Video hosting is very expensive. Not only does it consume so much disk space, it’s difficult to transcode these videos. It needs a lot of CPU power or a capable iGPU/GPU which most instances probably don’t have. I would love to have short videos on Lemmy but I’m hoping there are lots of available encoding options in place so we can fine tune it to fit our hardware.
For now, I think a good solution is video embedding and a better “player” for the front end. I’ve tried a few apps and I can watch videos from catbox.moe seamlessly with them.