Gregory's ServerThe @pixelfed app will autoplay videos, with the ability to enable this in the settings 🔥
 21 comments
   @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. ;) 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.  @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.
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. 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 @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.?  @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.  @dansup would really prefer autoplay was off by default. I find autoplaying immensely annoying, and I always turn it off    @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 😊  |
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.