 So here is a conundrum I'm facing with @pixelfed Stories, you can like, react or comment on them right, and those are sent as DM's to the Story author. Makes sense so far right? Here is the problem: Once the Story expires, it's deleted, and when you check your DM's, you'll see the replies but since the Story was deleted you won't be able to tell which one it was. So should we store a Story preview img, or rotate the Story so only author can see it? Feedback wanted! 25 comments
@pixelfed By rotate the Story, I mean rotate the media urls so the federated media urls are expired but the author can still view them. This also means every Story would need to be stored after expiration if we kept it, or just a screenshot, but even with a screenshot if the beginning of the video is black, you wouldn't have enough context. This requires some careful consideration, some people post a lot of Stories and the storage space could add up if mostly video   @dansup @pixelfed The screenshot idea sounds good. To work around the blank picture issue, you could employ similar logic as sites & applications that offer video thumbnail suggestions by scanning the video. I'm sure there's a library out there that can assist, but as I don't use PHP any more I can't name one sorry. Another option is allowing the user to select the story "preview" time code As an aside, screenshot vs. retain video for author could be a setting configurable by the instance admin  @dansup @dansup Develop a simple preview rendering component that retrieves metadata and screenshot from storage and displays it nicely.- Use video thumbnailing tools to generate a preview image for videos. Something like the first 5-10 seconds. Allow preview image dimensions/quality to be adjusted based on storage limitations. Maybe Lazy loading when displaying previews. Client-side caching and a CDN to improve preview load times. Also, replace exact timestamps with relative times. So for that specific problem, seems to make most sense to store the preview as kind of message attachment, so that it shares the same lifecycle as the message and will always be right there when needed. That being said, a story archive totally makes sense, as these things are most probably valuable to the author beyond their 24h lifetime.  @dansup I found whenever a story expired on IG and I sent it on DMs I wanted to at least see a low res preview so I could remember the context, so I think story preview img would be best  That is how IG does it — but I never liked it, and always thought it was a poor user-experience. I thought it would have been better to just keep the story around (even if other people couldn't see it) so you had context. ... Although, as you said, it has a drive space cost.  @dansup @pixelfed in this case I would do it as on instagram - if I'm the autor of the story, I can only see a screenshot from it and a reply, if I replied to someone else's story, I can only see my answer, everything else disappears people that are going to use this feature are probably used to how it works right now, and storing original story for a long time in any form is against it's original idea   @dansup @pixelfed  |
Gregory's Server
@dansup @pixelfed for me both options make sense. I am leaning towards saving the preview, tho