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?
Lemmy's internal data performance is so horribly slow and crash-causing that I think the last thing they want is even more popular data.
Video is more data, popularity is more data. For whatever reason, at every turn, I've seen developers turn away from scaling options like Memcache, Redis, or just abandoning ORM data management and rewriting the data interfaces by hand....
That's already true for images that are hot linked routinely, so I don't think video really changes it.
I've been baffled since June why data and fixing lemmy's data coding hasn't been front and center. It's pretty wild to witness so many come to Lemmy and then turn away... Elon Musk has been flocking people, Reddit, etc. It's as if the project wants to make code that won't work on any data. It's baffeling.
Yeah I see op just casually skipping over the largest issue. People can't afford to host video on Lemmy, and I don't see a ton of people lining up to donate. Even if they add it, I'd hope it'd be configable to turn off. I don't need people uploading 4k videos to my instance constantly. Both storage and compute would be off the charts