But gifs don’t need to be murdered to move forward - they are simple, and “good enough” for tiny non-animated things, it’s just that as they get more complex, better formats scale better to higher frame numbers and such.

So e.g. the Fediverse software could still allow a movie animation as the post content, and then (like YouTube?) either manufacture a still image as the preview shown to people prior to consent via clicking to see the animation effect, or possibly allow the user to submit their own still image to be a chosen representative. That way, movies can still have their place, without having to blaze past the consent of the recipient.

Now that I think about it… this is how Reddit does it too iirc? For user submissions anyway, though more recently the ads will auto-play even without explicitly clicking on them as you scroll downwards.:-( Bc fuck spez, that’s why.:-(

So there are definitely multiple ways to handle it, besides just leaving it how it currently is. In the meantime, I think I’ll not submit animations the vast majority of the time, bc how they are handled by Lemmy is just too annoying to have the infinite repetitions.