Video Upload Support

Features and Ideas
#1

Hello, i am new to the fediverse, i’ve been trying many options in the fediverse and Diaspora seems great! Great simple UI with dark mode, aspects is an awesome feat.But no vídeo upload? Why? And links to peertube or lbry or some self hosted file will not play embeded.

This is frustantig, an awesome social media platform, but no video upload. Implement video upload, and if possible with access to the drive media, like hubzilla.

Thanks in advance.

#2

I suggest using the search feature the next time, these things have been discussed a lot already. The tl;dr:

  • Video hosting and distribution is a pain in the butt. Not only have to provide a lot of storage space and bandwidth, you only have to transcode videos into different sizes and formats to make them work across all devices and internet connections. This is completely out of our scope. There still is a feature request open, but quite frankly, that’s simply unlikely to happen.
  • “Embedding” something means to load interactive content into your diaspora* stream. One side effect with the current implementation is that any malicious entity could also a piece of JavaScript that reads your stream, your contacts, your account settings, … and whatnot. We’re really comfortable that YouTube is not going to do that, but there is no guarantee that your self-hosted whateversoftware won’t do that. Moreover, in the current implementation, we explicitly allow-list allowed domains for embeds - and for self-hosted software, that’s literally impossible. There is a planned refactoring around embedding stuff into its own context - at which point we could do a lot more automatic embeds.
#3

Thank you for the fast reply and explanation. I understand those motives and it is good to know there is those concerns with security. About the video hosting i can imagine of the amount of work, but other platforms on fediverse can do it, i my mind i think i would be reasonble to implement it even if it takes some years to implement it, but if the embeding option is being planned that’s good news. Thanks again for the reply.

#4

Well, not really.

“Other platforms” might allow you to upload a video file and then they might throw that into a video element, and that’s great and all. But that’s kinda naive. If you uploaded a 4K 60fps video, that might be just fine for you, but if one of your contacts comes along and wants to check out your post on a mobile phone with a regular mobile network connection, they’ll have a hard time.

The only “fediverse” implementation that is doing actual transcoding is PeerTube - and PeerTube is a project that does nothing but video sharing. They can literally spend all their development effort on making video work, and that’s good for them. But as I said, video hosting is absolutely nothing diaspora* is focussing on, and given the amount of work required, its unrealistic to expect diaspora* to do that. Embedding PeerTube might be a thing in the future, though.

(I’m ignoring some transcoding abilities in platforms that transcode gifs into mp4s etc, that’s not really relevant here.)

#5

Didn’t know that about the video upload in other platforms. Thank you for the explanation. Embeding PeerTube would already be a good feat that can be used as alternative to video upload and for someone who does not want to host on YT. Keep up the good work.