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dansup

The @pixelfed app will autoplay videos, with the ability to enable this in the settings 🔥

#pixelfed #app #availableSoon

20 comments
Григорий Клюшников

Why? The only purpose of video autoplay in commercial social media apps is to inflate metrics. No user ever asked for it.

Also autoplay with sound? That's just not something that should be done. Ever. If muted autoplay is only mildly annoying because you have to unmute each video you'd like to watch and miss several seconds of audio, this is outright malicious, it startles people and wakes up their partners.

dansup

@grishka I find it handy but I will disable it for now.

Skyper 💻🎧☕📖

@grishka @dansup I agree that autoplay should be off by default. Among several drawbacks, it has an important impact on resource consumption, which is something we should all act on.

Dave

@dansup @grishka For the audio, I'd go with the imgur approach: Muted by default (per "browsing session"), but as soon as you enable audio on any video, every video you scroll into view starts with audio. Until you mute any video again.

But yeah, a general bandwidth saving option (no preloading, load low-res thumbnails only, load hi-res images/video only once one clicks through) would be nice. There are still people trävelling with Deutsche Bahn. ;)

Григорий Клюшников

Dave, Instagram does this and it's absolutely horrible. You enable audio once, then you spend a minute scrolling through photos, then you end up seeing a video and it startles you.

Deutsche Bahn taught me the German word Verspätung.

Braw ☕🏳️‍🌈

@grishka first part is not true. Being close to normies and having talked to many normies, autoplay *without sound* is *expected* when you are scrolling feeds nowadays unless you enabled data/energy saving mode. Reason being: videos are *regular content* like images, posted with expectation to be muted by default, and adapted to that. Likewise for GIFs, although I'd argue that GIFs should have limit how much they can replay, because some of them are very short and annoying.

@dansup

Григорий Клюшников

Braw :blob_cat_melt: 🏳‍🌈, it's this weird part of human psychology that people tend to rationalize bad things, sometimes even convincing themselves that it's actually good that it exists/happens. It goes way beyond the IT industry, there are people who genuinely oppose radical life extension, for example.

posted with expectation to be muted by default, and adapted to that

By whom? Influencers? Of course they will adapt to whatever the platform does to them and expects from them, no matter how stupid. They owe their popularity to all those algorithms and dark patterns that force-feed people content from outside of their network.

Braw :blob_cat_melt: 🏳‍🌈, it's this weird part of human psychology that people tend to rationalize bad things, sometimes even convincing themselves that it's actually good that it exists/happens. It goes way beyond the IT industry, there are people who genuinely oppose radical life extension, for example.

Braw ☕🏳️‍🌈

@grishka
> people tend to rationalize bad things

How is video autoplay is bad? We're talking muted by default. For me, having videos not autoplay is equivalent to having all pictures hidden behind a content warning. I'm using social media to engage with others' content, I would watch the video anyway. Autoplay reduces unnecessary UI interactions.

> By whom? By whom? Influencers?

Whoever publishing the content. Even not adapted, you'd understand you need to unmute the video easily.

@dansup

@grishka
> people tend to rationalize bad things

How is video autoplay is bad? We're talking muted by default. For me, having videos not autoplay is equivalent to having all pictures hidden behind a content warning. I'm using social media to engage with others' content, I would watch the video anyway. Autoplay reduces unnecessary UI interactions.

Григорий Клюшников

Braw :blob_cat_melt: 🏳‍🌈,

How is video autoplay is bad?

It wastes your data and makes you do extra actions to watch the video from the beginning (if that's even possible, hi Instagram Reels on the web). Usually the thumbnail and the description are enough for you to decide whether you want to watch the video or not. Autoplaying doesn't help with that. And you still have to click or tap it to unmute it.

Braw ☕🏳️‍🌈

@grishka

> It wastes your data
That's why—if you are so concerned about data use—you can turn off autoplay manually or by turning on data saving mode. Not sure about Pixelfed, but on social media videos often are well compressed and offered in several qualities, so it's NABD.

Watching from the beginning has nothing to do with autoplay. It's UI issue, some platforms restart the video when you expand it. YouTube Shorts and TikTok allow to rewind easily.

@dansup [1/2]

@grishka

> It wastes your data
That's why—if you are so concerned about data use—you can turn off autoplay manually or by turning on data saving mode. Not sure about Pixelfed, but on social media videos often are well compressed and offered in several qualities, so it's NABD.

Watching from the beginning has nothing to do with autoplay. It's UI issue, some platforms restart the video when you expand it. YouTube Shorts and TikTok allow to rewind easily.

Braw ☕🏳️‍🌈

Thumbnails and descriptions are not a good substitute for video, especially on social media. It's along the lines of ‘I'm not reading allat’—‘I'm not describing my video or photoshopping a thumbnail’. Look at alt text use for example.

> Autoplaying doesn't help with that.

I guess in your experience it doesn't. In my experience, scrolling Twitter and Telegram with autoplay, it's very rare to have to expand a video, or want it be paused ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@grishka @dansup [2/2]

hansenerd

@brawaru @grishka @dansup default autoplay with ability to turn off might work for users, but for instances it means paying for egress data, a lot. For videos that get scrolled over most of the time.

orca

@grishka @brawaru @dansup What you are talking about is just changing the topic to some other thing from my point of view. Pixelfed is trying to be an alternative to Instagram and in doing that it HAS to take in features like this that are by default neither good or bad just handy features that make the experience better.

And if we try to argue if this feature or other features are bad and that humans just rationalize bad things why are you seemingly the only one in the thread with this idea.?

Graham Downs

@dansup @pixelfed Really? Do people really want autoplay videos? I'm asking non-ironically. I really want to know. Because auto-play videos is my -- and everyone I know's -- single biggest pet hate on social media apps, and the first thing we go digging around trying to figure out how to switch OFF every time we re-install Facebook etc.

Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)

@dansup would really prefer autoplay was off by default. I find autoplaying immensely annoying, and I always turn it off

DELETED

@dansup @pixelfed Any news on when iOS version is submitted to either TestFlight or App Store ? Long time beta tester here, just trying to keep up with the latest :)

pixelfed

@ern @dansup The new version will be uploaded to TestFlight today, and we'll do a few days of beta testing before we opt to submit to the app store!

DELETED

@pixelfed @dansup Ahh cool awesome to know. I keep trying to check the App Store, but also check TestFlight. I’m kind of occupied by #AudioMo an audio challenge I started 14 years ago that seems to have taken off here. So may have missed your update posts that I ordinarily look out for. Thank you for taking the time to answer, most kind 😊

Krautnapped™

@dansup @pixelfed I'm fine with autoplay on by default, but automute should be a thing. Even the video demo nearly made me do a spit-take.

If I want to listen to something, I can click on a sound button to listen to it.

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