this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2025
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I've noticed this, too. Haven’t worked out why they only work half the time. None of the gifs I post in the comments are my OC. I borrow the direct link from search results. Weirdly, it still looks OK on my end whilst viewing on Boost for Lemmy. I posted using Boost, too. If you see any in my comment history that are now no longer present, maybe posting via Boost is the answer to the issue
The other person explaining is definitely right. Also FYI what you are describing is called hotlinking and is generally considered to be bad internet etiquette because it adds load to someone’s server without driving real traffic to their site (although there is some debate around this that’s been ongoing for 30 years lol). The “best practice” is to copy the actual image (not the link) and paste it into Boost, and that should automatically upload the image to your lemmy/piefed instance and host it from there.
Thanks a lot, I will do that in future!
Probably because of the cloudflare layer. It shows me a captcha when I click on the link to your image, so it makes sense that embedding wouldn't work correctly.
Does that mean only folks who use Cloudflare DNS will have issues? I am not very techy when it comes to network related things
No, it's the website you linked (yarn.co) that uses cloudflare protection (against bots, DDoS attacks etc). When it detects any traffic it deems unusual, it shows a captcha that the visitor needs to click before being able to view the image. It can't display a captcha when you've embedded the image into a Lemmy post though, so the image just won't load at all in that case.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm not sure why it works for half the time, though, as people are definitely seeing it. Is it because of the amount of traffic the gif has caused to Yarn.co after being embedded into a Lemmy post?
I guess not everyone's traffic is being deemed unusual/suspicious. There are many deciding factors that cloudflare could use to differentiate from "normal" traffic, such as location, browser, OS, VPN usage etc.
Thank you! Makes sense now