Ugh. Just when I thought I couldn't hate animated GIFs any more than I did before. That's a crime against good taste, if not against humanity itself.

Folks put a lot of their personality into their avatars–the good, the bad and the ugly–and it certainly expresses the 'freedom' side of D*, but having both user level options: 'turn off .gif avatars', 'turn off all .gif' would be great.

+1 for support for gifs and +1 for choice for not having them - then we fill freedom AND usability

I would also suggest H264 as a possible format. It is much smaller than .gif and provides much higher quality.

Well, I'm not sure that h264 is the best candidate. It is not an open format, and I'm not sure we'd want to have small videos for user avatars.

Dependency on H.264 is definitely not suitable, since it's a proprietary codec. In general, animation is resource hungry, and supporting it in avatars can be taxing, especially in the mobile view.

How about a file size limit?

Allow as most extensions as possible, but limit them all by a maximum file size.

Okay half a year ago I didn't have any opinion in this or was just undecided. Now my point is (if this is still an active discussion): listen to the users. They want to have GIFs, because they want to have some kind of multimedia going on. Static content is so much 80's.

Don't get me wrong. I know that a lot of sites look creepy if they support animated GIFs like myspace. But to simply say no to an obvious user-wish (looking at tumblr, which is quite successful) is too easy. We need to find ways of displaying GIFs or other animated content nicely to the user. Probably we should make the GIF static at first and let it animate when the user hovers the mouse over it or touches it on the user's touch-device. Probably we also need some option to disable animated media entirely for the users, too. But please don't ignore the users and their most used features.

I think it's more accurate to say that some users want animated GIFs. Not all of them.

You're right. Not all want them. For myself I never had a GIF-avatar and think it's silly. But I still think that this is a reasonable feature for a lot of users. My timeline in Diaspora is full of animated GIFs, although I regularly unfollow people who are posting too many too large GIFs.

I'm the same. That's why I think it makes sense to enable animated GIFs but give users the option to disable them in user preferences.

Everyone, there seems to be consensus on this, shall we have a proposal and a quick vote?

Why specifically gifs by the way? Gif is an inferior format for all purposes. If you want animation as vector - better use SVG, that's the right way to do it. If want animation as raster - use video as others proposed. WebM with no sound should be a good candidate.

I.e. video can be even GPU accelerated. I doubt animated GIFs specifically are. So performance wise small video file of the same size will be preferable.

Because GIFs seem to be the most commonly posted animated image format, and what was 'brought to the table' in this discussion by Sean (and what was being discussed in Github as well). I'm certainly not meaning to rule other formats out, simply saying 'let's deal with this one issue now and look at others later'.

As I said below, I hate GIFs (and animated images in general), but it's what people seem to be using at the moment.

Commonly used doesn't mean it should be proliferated and burden D* users with it (if its performance is inferior). If user wants to go out of the way and create an animated avatar (creating animation requires some skill), user can figure out how to create a webm video. If not, someone can put a tutorioal. I don't see a problem with offering a good option which isn't common, and not offering a common bad option.

I think such setup can work out:

1. Give an option to add WebM avatar (limit resolution and file size, somehow limit it to no sound - needs to be researched how to automate that).
2. If browser can't show video - fall back to showing static image for avatar, otherwise show that WebM in a video tag.

Can we have a longer voting time for such a controversial topic please?

So what technologies are out there to accomplish the proposal? I think we should investigate that first.

@shmerl support video is something completely different. Here we simply have a tag and users used it to put gif. We did not officially say that we support animated avatars because it can be too heavy for small servers / connections / mobiles. So if we want to officially support animated avatars, we have to put an option to podmins / users to display them or not.

We are far away than a feature which would request a tag. Too many problem : it's heavier than animated images, so it's worse for bad connections / servers, only the recent browsers support it, it's not the same codec for Chrome / Firefox (webm) than for Safari / IE (H264)... We have many things more important to do than implement video for avatars.

It's not different conceptually. Forget about tags for a moment. The concept is simple - animated avatars. First think whether we even want it or not. Let's say we do. How to implement it in efficient way and with sensible fallbacks?

it's heavier than animated images

This is very questionable. If you want to research it seriously, create a test case with 50 animated gifs and 50 WebM videos of the same resolution and duration. Test the CPU utilization in both cases (when all are present on the page). Then you can have a conclusive understanding. My expectation - WebM will perform better CPU wise, but nothing is of course guaranteed. I wouldn't worry about crippled browsers like IE and Safari. They are still catching up for many things, and WebM support is one of them. They can have a static fallback if they can't play the video.

We have many things more important to do than implement video for avatars.

If so, you shouldn't be busy with animated gifs now as well, since it's the same thing, but with wrong tools.

So my view on this - either do things right (research, test, implement the video avatar with static fallback), or don't even bother with it until you have time.

However if this is just about "keep no limitations on img which potentially allows using SVG and GIF" - that's a different scope of the discussion.

@shmerl

However if this is just about "keep no limitations on img which potentially allows using SVG and GIF" - that's a different scope of the discussion.

The beginning of the discussion was that.
About research of what we should do to correctly deal with that, I'd really prefer to focus on these things for the moment.

Hi Jonne, I thought it was worth creating a proposal as the discussion had seemed to stall some time ago but there seemed a reasonable consensus for this one proposition. So I thought I'd create the proposal to focus our minds: is this actually a good proposal and should we vote for it. I'm quite happy for it to be shot down.

If you don't think that enabling animated GIFs is a good idea even as a short-term solution, please argue against it. I'm quite happy for my proposal to be shot down, and if I'm convinced it is not a good proposal, I'll change my vote.

I'm not trying to force us down any route; simply to provide a means to speed up the decision-making.

This is another "do this!" proposal without any technical background. So I repeat my question:

What technologies are out there to accomplish the proposal?

I still don't like and that's my opinion and I'm going to vote on that. No further arguing required than I've already done. I just wanted to point out that we're voting on something while we have no idea how we can implement it.

And the second point is too directly what I said, 9 days isn't enough time IMO. Nothing meant to subversively to boycott the proposal. I mean what I say.

Well, one way we could do it is programmatically with a bit of JavaScript. A quick search of StackOverflow brings this up. Making it work cross-browser is my only real concern here.

We could just call a variable from user settings asking whether the user enabled for gifs avatars to animate, if true, gif avatars are animated, if false, they simply stay as the first frame of the gif animation.

Sean, javascript in the browser is a nice approach. If this is not possible to make this happen to all browsers OR if this is not performant to the user, we can also create a dynamic URL that flattens a given GIF via ImageMagick into the first frame and delivers this image to the user, who does not want to see animated GIFs. This would have been my first guess.

Personally I think javascript should be avoided here and the user choice respected when offering information from the server. What about when a user uploads a profile pic and if it is an animated gif - another version is created which only contains the first frame. Then depending on user settings the correct version is offered.

How would this suit the way we store profile pics and federate them?

Also the approach by @rasmusfuhse sounds good to me as well.

Edit; the proposal mentions not profile pics but also posts, sorry didn't notice that. I don't really see why we should support removing animation from gifs in posts. It's directly messing with and modifying content posted by another user - and personally I find that something that shouldn't be done on the app side.

hm, if what Jason says is true I find it a bad idea to mix those two features in one proposal:

1) allow animated GIF avatars (which I disdain)
2) allow animated GIFs in user posts (which is fine for me)

Jason, you're right. GIFs in posts are user-content. But Diaspora is a viewer to this content and I as a user I would expect that I can define what contents I am viewing and probably even how. The #nsfw tag is legally the same. I can define if I want to see #nsfw contents all the time or only if I click on them. This could be a nice blueprint for the logic to display animated GIFs.

The NSFW tag isn't really modifying the way the post is shown - it isn't shown at all until the user clicks. If animated gifs are flattened according to user settings, it could change the whole post.

Maybe a minor issue, but then I don't really have a problem with animated gifs in posts. In avatars to be honest I might even turn the block setting on myself - if it was enabled and animated gifs were officially allowed in profile images.

But yeah, maybe these should be two proposals...

If animated gifs are flattened according to user settings, it could change the whole post.

I don't mind that - it's what happens for me in Firefox in any case. What I absolutely would mind if it were possible for people to upload animations (either in avatars or posts) which it were not possible for me to disable by default.

Just a thought: I've just remembered that Makrio allows the posting of GIF animations, but these are displayed as a still image with a 'GIF' logo and a play button overlaid. See https://makr.io/front_page

Would it be possible to see if the code they have written to achieve this (which seems to work well) could be ported to Diaspora? Hopefully this would be a case where this would work.

I've just added a couple of weeks to the closing date of the proposal I started, in response to requests.

I checked the makr.io code, and for me, it seems that they've simply provided each gif with a non-moving screenshot. From page source for example I got this and this picture. The non-moving images are provided with an attribute; "has_gif", and in this way the prevent the animations from showing instantly. Wouldn't recommend it for diaspora, for the happiness of the servers' sake.

@seantilleycommunitymanager At least it works in Firefox, Chrome and Safari, I made a quick test and it looks just fine! Don't know if the canvas makes the site load slower as it has to do some image processing, but if the differences aren't that big it could totally be possible to implement this feature! :)

http://docs.babillage.org/diaspora/test_img.html

@ivangabrielmorn Actually, this solution looks like a really good treatment for animated gifs in the stream. I'm not sure whether it would be best to put a play button on user avatars, though.

No play buttons please - if we want to restrict please lets make it configurable for users. Not everyone hates animated gifs you know. I love them :)

@jasonrobinson I love them too, at least some of them! Didn't you see that I chose such a cool one when I tested the code to place them within a positive context? ;)
And of course I think this should be an option, not the one-and-only default!
@seantilleycommunitymanager Haha, naah. But maybe a little pause button that stops all instances of the profile image when clicked and that only appears when the user hovers over the image? :)

Perhaps animated avatars could be set to play once, rather than repeatedly, unless clicked on?

If the proposal to the right's outcome is positive (allow GIFs and provide option to disable), this way of changing the default seems logical and easy-to-understand to me: http://docs.babillage.org/diaspora/option.jpg

Do you agree? :)

@goob But if the avatar is down the stream, you wouldn't see it animate at all. :(

I still hold that for animated avatars video should be used. Then you can control when it plays and how (with JavaScript). For gifs such control is non existent. It surely should be optional in a flexible way. I.e. without going deeply in some settings, there should be a trigger switch in the UI somewhere, which will dynamically enable / disable animation for those who care.

One can give user a way to upload several avatars for fallback (to cover lacking codecs support). Those who don't care to support all codecs / browsers will upload just 1 video avatar and one static avatar or static can be generated automatically from the first frame if it wasn't provided by the user.

It would make me really happy if other networks like Facebook and Twitter stole this idea/code from us and made opt-in GIFs available on their apps...

Actually I'd really like the option to set default to hide any post containing an animated GIF, because I'm heartily sick of them and I can't think of any circumstances under which I'd be interested in viewing one.

I like the mockup from @ivangabrielmorn - Since there are really only two options though (animate / don't animate) I think we could make it simpler by using a checkbox as opposed to a drop-down.

So a prettier version of something like:

[ ] Animate gif avatars
[ ] Animate gif posts