Hey everyone! So for the past few days I've spent probably 10+ hours researching / prototyping a nice embed strategy and experience for skrrrt. Without getting into too much technical detail, there's really no way for me to have a consistently nice experience because of the way different providers (instagram, youtube, etc.) output their data. Providers like instagram send the data along with special scripts that run on your browser to format the embed to look like an instagram post. The problem is I have to run those scripts in an unsafe way, and do so after you've already loaded the page. So it causes for a jumpy, gross experience only to show you an image of the post that you still have to click on to actually view. It's honestly kinda a nightmare. I'm sick of trying to make it work lol.
There is however a few options that I wanted to run past everyone
1) Get rid of embeds altogether. Just allow users to post links in the body of their post and we can click on the link. Essentially how it works in the chat
2) Youtube (and also Spotify, but that's less important) is one of the providers that does it really well and doesn't cause any headache for developers to embed their content. I could just determine if the post has a youtube link in it and render the video below the post. This would just be a bit of extra work and a kinda half-implemented solution that I'm not sure I love
3) I could pay $30/mo for https://iframely.com/. This is what I did when skrrrt initially launched, but I couldn't justify paying $30/mo for such a small piece of the app. I'd rather that money go to actual infrastructure. That being said, skrrrt pulls in around $100/mo and I currently spend ~$50-$70 on infra, so I could just max it out lol. I'm not trying to make money, just be smart with how it's spent.
If you any preference (or even if you don't) please respond to let me know! I want to make skrrrt the best possible experience for you all, so any and all feedback is appreciated. Thanks!