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spintin

Wrong prio: videos and animated .gif is 100% the ONLY thing anyone at that company should be spending ANY time on.

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Both videos and gifs are currently handled by media players, which is honestly just fine for me.

Hashtags help a lot with discovery, which imo is the correct priority.

Add link card? Ok buddy!

Are you going to pay the freight for videos you consume, or for videos you post? Which one? (There is no third option.)

Exactly. Every video has to be transcoded on upload, then stored for both fast delivery and then shifted to long-lived-but-cheaper storage after a set time period. There’s nothing trivial about it.

The only reason to give it away for free is if that allows them to ship the app with video-based ads — but it’s pretty much impossible for advertising to coexist with a decentralised messaging protocol.

And as a regular Bluesky user, I don’t miss gifs or video — it massively reduces the mindless attribution-free reposting of popular TikTok videos you see on Twitter, IG and (now increasingly) Threads.

I'm perfectly prepared to do that as I did yesterday with Add Link Card BUT I need bluesky to SHOW the damn .gif and not have users have to click on a URL!!!

It's a one second change.

Oh cool, another platform that optimizes for dopamine above all else! Definitely a fresh take on social media.

Come hang out on the [redacted] social network:

- you're required to post at least 1 video every day or the platform doxes you automatically

- video content autoplays with audio

- surge pricing

- every video within the viewport autoplays, with audio

- the audio volume of each video is based on its trending score

- posts disappear unless you share it within a (random/variable) time limit

- no video longer than 4 seconds

- LOWERCASE GETS YOU BANNED

- dark mode for premium subscribers

[redacted] Social: we were worst first.

No, they need DMs. They have embedded videos, autoplaying videos and gifs are tacky.

Coming soon hopefully, says one of the lead devs:

https://bsky.app/profile/pauljessup.com/post/3kmkrhnupd726

The post you linked is not from one of the lead devs, and from what I hear DMs are pretty far down the roadmap but I don't have a reference on-hand.

Considering the entire protocol design I don't think DMs will be that easy to implement. They'd need some form of asymmetric key encryption scheme for personal data servers and messages would then need to be read directly from the relevant personal data servers as the app view servers would not have the necessary user private keys to decrypt stuff. Will be interesting to see how they solve it for sure. But as you point out, probably far down the road map.

That’s about right. It only gets really daunting if we decide to do e2ee, which we’d really like to do but have to decide if we can afford to spend that kind of time. Might be smarter to just make signal username sharing btwn users easier in the short term.

Damn it, my miss. Thank you for the correction.

This does seem to be a good opportunity to retire the obsolete and wasteful .gif format ? (Or maybe at least limit it to maximum pixel area ?)

But you just meant looping animations, right ?

.gif is better than video if you have a small area that changes on the picture frame by frame.

.gif can handle transparency.

.gif will never be obsolete.

Also dithering is an aesthetic!

GIFs can be highly optimised for tiny simple animations, but 99.9% of the GIFs that people actually want to send are not in that category. webm (for example) can handle transparency too, has cross-platform support, and better compression ratios than GIF for anything remotely video-like.

GIF is only wasteful if it's used as a substitute for video.

Which it largely is.

DMs is what we need first.

can you explain the rational? DM are for private interaction. Social media are more publishing platforms (ie. Media plaftorm with a social aspect). Messaging apps allow for interpersonal interaction but they definitely don't have the same impact. Which use case do you have in mind for prioritizing DMs? Usually DMs are for sales, or harassment (which is sometime the same) If you have friends, you usually have other ways to communicate with outside of bluesky. So I am genuinely curious why you would think that DM are a priority?

"Social media are more publishing platforms "

That's what social media companies want them to be, but it's in our hands to decide if we use them for consumption only.

I agree that DMs are often abused and not the best medium for one-on-one communication, but without DMs how would you upgrade a conversation to a more suitable medium?

It’s a social communications platform. We should have DMs

Speaking for myself, I’ve met three or four people on BlueSky I’d like to have a private communication channel for. I didn’t know them previously.

HN doesn't have DMs either, but we usually figure things out one way or another (e.g. contact info in bio)

Only if you are willing to publish contact info in your profile. I am much more willing to open my DMs than doing that.

I realize that open DMs are not an option for high profile accounts, but for most people probably safer than publishing their email or - god forbid - their phone number.

Are there user profiles on Bluesky? You could make an email account just for your Bluesky dms and then write some random string on your profile and auto delete any emails that don't include that string as a sort of filter against spam. You could also post a public key there so you can have encrypted comms al la old school pgp.

The email solution I use has no lightweight account creation and regardless, I like to keep my contact surface small and additional email addresses are detrimental to that. I was happy with DMs on Twitter and I wish Bluesky had them, that's all.

companies can often do more than one thing at once...

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