Another one of these again, huh? Alright, fine. Let's dial the crankiness to somewhere near six out of ten, because multiple months of being jerked around in this way seem like they deserve that kind of self-respect.
Recently, Bluesky decided to pivot to video, because that will work if everyone just keeps trying. I've been told, repeatedly by both Bluesky staff and Bluesky evangelists, that this will finally allow me to post animations to Bluesky! Great! That sounds so wonderful. So, let's give that a shot.
Here's a gif I'd like to post to Bluesky.
Nothing special, nothing fancy-shmancy. It's just your everyday, average gif. Check this one out if you like, it's about 102KB. I did my best to hand-craft it to perfect specifications, limiting the colors and otherwise preventing filesize bloat! It's a nice gif, I suppose.
Now, lately, everyone's been telling me to get with the times. Don't expect gifs to work! You gotta pivot to video! Pivoting to video always works! Well, sounds great, sure. I've converted it to video! And I've even learned, over the course of ten minutes of googling, how to do so essentially perfectly. Take a look!
Wow! If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at the same thing! Unless I'm on Chrome or a Chromium derivative like many Operas and suchlike, in which case I can suck it, because Chrome will scale it up with no respect for aliasing -- since videos are inferior in that way. By learning various facts through research, I've turned a gif into a video without damaging anything, assuming you're on firefox and not the market-share majority browser. And, try right-clicking and downloading: Only 80KB! Any downsides? Well, a few. Do you have an old browser? Chrome? An old device? A prohibitive firewall, or a net-nanny? Tough nuggets, I suppose, we're pivoting to video around here like good little entrepreneurs.
Anyway, let's try putting it on Bluesky!
I uploaded this file directly. You can see it at this link yourself, if you like! Here's a screenshot, if you're not so inclined.
Uh oh! Eugh. It came out disgusting! I wonder what its specs are now.
Bluesky has increased the filesize of my video by 300%, damaged the image quality, removed essential data, and, just to add some insult to injury, I've got some bots clogging my notifications now.
Let's be a little more generous though. Maybe I'm putting a little too much strain on bsky's poor servers, since I'm told everything is so new, and they'll get better later. The developers, who are forced by scripture or a blood curse or something like that to always, ALWAYS intervene and re-process my video, in a way I can't opt out of, and for whom I just need to have gentle patience, would surely want me to not strain their poor hardware with 80kb of webm. Why don't I try something even smaller?
Oh, you might be having trouble seeing that. Here, I'll make it a tiny bit bigger.
Not a lot to look at, right? Well, that's because it's only 942 of god's own bytes. Not KB, just plain old B. You could snag this bad boy off of a dialup modem in 1996, pure and true, and not break a sweat. Heck, I'll even make it a webm for you. I'm just that nice.
That's 848 bytes. Put that one in your pocket, buster. If this light-touch video doesn't glide through bsky's video servers like a fiber supplement through a retirement home, I don't know what on god's green earth actually will. Let's hit upload while I take a big drink of water from this glass.
Ah.
Yeah, whatever, I guess. Someone ring me up when the people who professionally maximize investor quarterly returns suddenly grow the common decency to leave my files alone and prioritize user needs instead of one-size-fits-all branding. Or, bare minimum, let me opt-out of this dogwater first-result-on-NPM compression library. Better yet than all that, do nothing and just say "hi" to Vine and Google+ for me on your way to the footnotes, whether that's before or after this twelve-year-inflated bubble bursts and leaves you holding the bag.
I wish good websites hadn't died to make room for this crap.
