I’ve been loving Lemmy and mastodon and feel they are coming along as good replacements for Reddit and Twitter. Outside the fediverse, I occasionally enjoy posting dumb little video shorts and I put them on TikTok, Facebook and Insta because I have friends, family and followers on each. (TikTok, Gen-Z, my daughter…Facebook, Gen-X, my wife…Insta, millennials, my younger sister). I don’t browse them heavily myself, but it helps me stay connected and it’s fun when something you make goes micro-viral occasionally.

I’d love to get more into the habit of sharing on the feddiverse and someday get rid of those others altogether (pipe dream)…so today I had dumb 22 second video of a rabbit, chipmunk and birds all around my birdfeeder. From my iPhone it’s a 40 MB mov file. I put it up on TikTok, Facebook and Insta very easily. Figured I’d put it on…mastodon I guess, and start that habit?

Whelp, mastodon allows videos of that sizes but failed to process it 3 times. Next idea…might as well just sign up for pixelfed and use that to put it on mastodon, then use it as an Instagram replacement… I sign up and pixelfed doesn’t accept the .mov video format…and I believe there is a file size limit of 15MB as well. I don’t want to have to resize and reformat every video to post.

I could use YouTube or a YouTube alternative (peertube), but I hate the fact that regular video services are trying to make short vertical videos happen on them to compete with TikTok. I hate seeing TikTok style stuff on YouTube and Facebook…it’s crappy and out of place. The epitome of enshittification.

Any tips or ideas? As far as fediverse platforms, I am committed to using and growing Lemmy and mastodon and I think I need to consider a 3rd service that is better for video/photos, whether it’s pixelfed, peertube or something else…but at this point I got kind of stuck when I got frustrated with pixelfed and I’m not sure what to try next. I’d prefer not to have to resize and reformat a video just to share it…every time. And I’d prefer not to join something (another one I haven’t heard of) that may not be successful. pixelfed seems like it’s really exploding…that’s why I figured that would be good.

Advice?