I have noticed that only a small handful of gifs will play automatically and within the app while scrolling through a community, but the vast, vast majority of the time a link is shown and you have to navigate away from the feed / lemmy (in the built in browser) to view them.
I thought it might be a limitation of lemmy / the fediverse until I saw the few above mentioned gifs.
Is the playing of (nearly) all gifs within Connect something that can happen and will
come in time?
Autoplaying gifs are in fact small sized webp files that Lemmy natively supports.
But I agree that a inline video / gif viewer is mainly the last big thing I want in a Lemmy client. It's a burden having to tap to open them without any preview