This might be a bit of a niche thought, but I’ve been wondering: is it just me, or has anyone else ever thought about how cool (and possibly important) it would be to have a federated alternative to platforms like Giphy and Tenor?
These platforms are everywhere—embedded into our keyboards, messaging apps, social media tools—but they’re centralized, proprietary, and often raise questions around privacy, data mining, and corporate consolidation of internet culture.
In the age of the Fediverse, where we’re seeing federated replacements for Twitter (Mastodon), Reddit (Lemmy), YouTube (PeerTube), Instagram (Pixelfed), etc., it seems like the next logical step would be a federated GIF repository and search engine.
Imagine a platform where communities could host and share GIFs in a decentralized way. Artists could upload and tag their own content, instances could have their own moderation rules, and apps could tap into the federation to serve GIFs without relying on corporate APIs.
It could even potentially extend beyond GIFs into stickers, short looping videos, meme formats, Bitmoji - style Emoji’s, etc.
That said—I’d absolutely love to attempt something like this, but I’ll be honest: I just don’t currently have the knowledge, time, or energy to build such a project myself.
Still, I can’t shake the feeling that this could be a valuable addition to the wider Fediverse ecosystem.
So I wanted to put this out there and ask:
Has anyone ever considered/already started working on something like this?
Are there any existing tools or protocols that could make this easier to develop?
What kind of features would you want to see in a federated GIF platform?
Curious to hear your thoughts.
It’s possible, but I would not want to be the dude that does it. CSAM and Abuse, Gore and illegal activity, I’ll be traumatised
I’ve seen Lemmy map instances before. Moderation must be a nightmare…
This is literally any site, including forums, lemmy instances, and more; ANY and all of those that allows the uploading/downloading of GIFs, PNGs, or videos up to a certain filesize.
The common 5, 10 or even 25 megabyte limits were one of the reasons these snippets became popular in the first place. Generally, you can e-mail such things as well.
That is to say, the federated version has been here all along. Certainly before tenor, giphy, or Vine became things, for some reason.
There are open source / self-hosted giphy types of things. Not sure what federating would add, unless you wanted content discovery or something? A link to a picture is a link to a picture, no need to re-host it across instances.
What I was thinking was perhaps something similar to Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or etc., with instances hosted by different people?
Each instance could potentially host different user submitted gif types, i.e one instance would carry all sad gifs, another all happy, yet another all queer gifs, another all Harry Potter, etc., and users would be able to search through the entire platform using a united search, perhaps something similar to Peertube’s Sepia Search, that allows users to find the gif(s) that they are looking for.
Cool idea to be honest
Thank you very much.
short looping videos
is being worked on by the team behind Pixelfed, it’s not on ActivityPub as of yet but it is intended to become part of the fediverse: https://loops.video
The software part is easy. The hassles are more in dealing with abuse, ddos attacks, inappropriate content, etc. Hosting can also get expensive if usage gets high enough. But, things like this have been done plenty of times and there is lots of such software already available.
What is the point of repeatedly making these posts, when you have no intention of actually doing any work to implement them, and hardly even engage with people who reply? I feel like all you’re doing is sapping the time from people who do engage.
I’ve seen OP replying in other threads
I do engage.
I just happen to have a busy life.
I just like to toss out ideas that I think of for other users/potential developers to potentially use, if they wish to.
Ideas are cheap. “(site) but federated” isn’t novel, and in a lot of cases you don’t really even explain what that looks like, and I can’t make it make sense either.
We all live busy lives. I wrote the last comment on the bus, I’m writing this one from the toilet. If you want to contribute to the fediverse, great! Set aside time and contribute to a project, either by extending existing ones or starting your own. There are plenty of minor bugs that need fixing, and if you are proficient in any languages, translations are always needed, no coding skill required.
Site but on the blockchain. Site but in the metaverse. Site but with NFTs. Site but with AI.
