There are no FOSS friendly GIF repositories I know of.
Also it’s better to have one GIF keyboard for whole OS, not one per every app.
What is a gif keyboard? What’s wrong with copy and pasting from ~/Pictures/memes/?
(Yes, I realize my old is showing)
Search for gifs directly in the keyboard instead of going to a different app or website. iMessage, FB Messenger, Discord, etc. have this
Most keyboards have this feature. What’s the point of having a separate one in each app?
The issue was for a desktop app. As far as I know windows doesn’t have such a feature.
Edit: Win11 introduced a gif option. As far as I know every big chat app for desktop that supports gifs has a extra pop up for gif selection: teams, discord, rocket chat
Okay for Desktop it probably makes sense
This feature was requested for the matrix client on desktop. A workaround mentioned was the macos gif keyboard. There have been multiple implementations by users, mine included, but all of them where rejected because of privacy concerns and that the core team hasn’t decided how they wanted it to be designed.
And then they complain about not enough users switching.
A good experience for the noob is essential.
Well, when it comes to Matrix, they can’t really “compromise” in a way that other platforms may be able to, as their protocol is designed to be as private and secure as possible first, then the features come later.
While “nobody cares about privacy” and features are king, I personally have a lot of respect for the Matrix developers for sticking true to their vision instead of compromising for the sake of adoption. Matrix and Element DO want to be feature-rich, but they will only accept things if they work with their principles.
Furthermore, the Matrix team aren’t the ones “complaining” about adoption, they’re actually quite happy with how much adoption there is - it isn’t insignificant as there’s over 80 million known accounts, which is much bigger than the ActivityPub social media platforms, and many people use Matrix independently which they can’t track.
While all of that is great and true it’s almost irrelevant because adding gif support doesn’t hamstring the privacy of the application.
SimpleX is newer, has arguably better privacy and already supports gif keyboards etc…
I use them both honestly, but I wouldn’t pretend missing some basic features is because of some higher privacy principle.
I’m not sure where the gif feature should be. It could also be implemented on the keyboard https://github.com/florisboard/florisboard/issues/53
