When I try to post, it uploads and generates a link but it doesn’t show up in the post. Is this a platform limitation?
Afaik, Lemmy only supports static images. Even uploading a .gif results in a non-animated image.
All you can do is link to a video hosted elsewhere.
Do I look like a know what a gif is
You can hotlink gifs. Don’t upload them since it will load them in the video player. It you use

that will hotlink the gif.
Gifs can be uploaded but there’s a low size limit. Still trying to figure it out. Probably varies by instance.
That appears to be true seeing as @Deceptichum uploaded a working .gif to their instance. I guess the ones I’ve tried were too big.
I don’t even know how to properly configure it on my own instance. I thought I had configured it properly to handle large gifs, but then it still doesn’t work sometimes for some random reason.
Doesn’t make it easier that lemmy uses pictrs 4 when pictrs 5 is currently the stable version. But I have no idea if Lemmy can handle that.
What format does it get converted into? Can you post a link that you got back (even in the comments)?
Each instance can configure pict-rs (the media subsystem, basically) a number of different ways or even disable videos entirely (or convert them to gifs, etc).
Regardless of format, Lemmy+Pict-rs isn’t really setup for videos longer than a few seconds (pict-rs has to transcode the upload, and there’s a hard timeout between Lemmy and pict-rs). Most people either upload to catbox and put the
.mp4
link as the post URL or post a YT or Peer Tube link.Sounds like a client limitation?