Lemmy is surprisingly good for the small amount of people compared to Reddit. And even with all the Images the apps have to load, the consume less data than reddit.
This month (Ce mois-ci) the use of reddit was very limited and a bit of r/place to look at the amazing anti-reddit art. Lemmy : about 3gB Reddit : 2.33gB
Last month (Le mois dernier) it was only reddit use. 12.49gB
Tho there aren't really many videos on Lemmy, which may explain a part of the difference.
And on reddit well there are the ads and the tracking.
No video is fantastic method to minimise bandwidth usage and strain. Video astronomically scales up in file size compared to anything else, with audio (64kbps OPUS) and images (80% quality JPEGs or WEBMs or GIFs) being orders of magnitude smaller.
GIFs are way bigger for the same length vs video because they're basically just a series of full images, whereas videos include the diff between frames.
But the rest is absolutely correct.
Incorrect, GIFs have a lot less frames than 24/30/60 frames per second, and are usually 4-8x smaller than 1080p video resolution. In case you are referring to the smart frame-based compression in videos with H.265/AV1, those cannot be embedded into webpages to be played the way GIFs can be treated like JPGs. The web still relies on H.264 for video embedding due to its decent compression and no decoding effect on battery life of any device, no matter a Pi, phone or laptop.
Yeah, videos don't have that repeating effect that GIFs do, but if you don't need that (and I personally find that annoying), H.264 videos are smaller and can have much higher frame rate. So H.264 video should be preferred unless there's a specific reason to use GIFs
@sugar_in_your_tea @TheAnonymouseJoker personally I think web players should just auto repeat videos if they're under like 8 seconds
Could calculate battery life effect of showing GIFs versus playing/autolooping H.264 videos, perhaps. GIFs will win any day.