is it likely that embedded videos will ever be a part of the lemmy experience?
One of the only things I find myself missing about reddit is the videos. I'm aware that it's not really feasible for videos to be hosted on a lemmy instance at the moment, but I'm curious if that might change
Wouldn't it be better to integrate with the existing federated video hosting service? (PeerTube) so basically host videos in PeerTube, link to Lemmy, make the Lemmy UI parse it as a video with a custom player
Does PeerTube distribute load across instances, like BitTorrent? Or does it assume that the hosting instance has enough bandwidth to support all concurrent users?
It uses WebTorrent for distribution between viewers watching at the same time which can temporarily help with the load on popular videos, but there still needs to be at least one source instance that's sharing the video "regularly" (for unpopular or old stuff), which ends up having the same bandwidth issues you'd get with any other video platform.
PeerTube uses the WebTorrent protocol for its videos, so it does distribute load with everyone currently watching a video helping distribute it to everyone else. Each instance is its own torrent tracker. I'm not sure how I feel about it, because your IP address is visible to anyone else watching the video also.
Storage space is one issue. Bandwidth (how many TB/mo goes out the server) is another. And for any "serious" use case transcoding would also be important (so you can keep the other two down for everyone except Apple users who are stubborn to adopt VP9/AV1, and to provide multiple quality options), which unlike the other two requires powerful hardware most instances do not have.
If there's enough people that find it useful, it could at least be an optional setting. It's really a client thing, though, nothing to do with Lemmy itself.