Mastodon: Faster access to centralized media

[koyuawsmbrtn]

Pitch

Looking for media to attach to a post on the internet can be really time-consuming and would need more resources on the computer. Having a search function for GIFs on Giphy or YouTube videos would be pretty nice. The feature should be opt-in since Mastodon is privacy-focused. Telegram for example does it like this:

Motivation

It can come in really handy having a search function for big centralized "media archives" like YouTube, Giphy, Vimeo, Archive.org etc.

Other searchable archives can be implemented with a callback like https://mediaproxy.mastodon.social/api/v1/getmedia/?platform=twitter&search=$q being able to be added right from the admin settings (notice that $q is a placeholder for the search term) returning an JSON object as follows:

{
"thumbnail": "https://example.com/thumbnail.png"
"media": "https://example.com/gifv.mp4",
"source": "https://example.com/preview/gifv",
"type": "video"
},
{
"thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DLzxrzFCyOs/maxresdefault.jpg"
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzxrzFCyOs",
"type": "url"
},
{
"thumbnail": "https://example.com/thumbnail.png"
"url": "https://example.com/cat.jpg",
"source": "https://example.com/preview/omgcoolcat",
"type": "photo"
}

Further discussion: https://koyu.space/@koyu/102264512190803284

[no-boot-device]

I don't see why this wouldn't be much better as a feature to implement in a seperate web app or some such entirely. I'm obviously not dismissing the use of it (as I have no doubt there'll be plenty of people saying you don't need this entirely, which in my opinion is false), I just feel it falls outside the usecase of Mastodon.

[koyuawsmbrtn]

Update from Mastodon: Someone made the point about legal concerns when re-uploading content, a solution to mitigate that problem is to add a copyright button to the image/gif with a link to the source

[stale[bot]]

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