Lemmy is surprisingly good for the small amount of people compared to Reddit. And even with all the Images the apps have to load, the consume less data than reddit.
This month (Ce mois-ci) the use of reddit was very limited and a bit of r/place to look at the amazing anti-reddit art. Lemmy : about 3gB Reddit : 2.33gB
Last month (Le mois dernier) it was only reddit use. 12.49gB
Tho there aren't really many videos on Lemmy, which may explain a part of the difference.
And on reddit well there are the ads and the tracking.
Yeah, videos don't have that repeating effect that GIFs do, but if you don't need that (and I personally find that annoying), H.264 videos are smaller and can have much higher frame rate. So H.264 video should be preferred unless there's a specific reason to use GIFs
@sugar_in_your_tea @TheAnonymouseJoker personally I think web players should just auto repeat videos if they're under like 8 seconds
Could calculate battery life effect of showing GIFs versus playing/autolooping H.264 videos, perhaps. GIFs will win any day.