It’s basically a universal format.
True, it even has “interchange” in the name!
CompuServe encouraged the adoption of GIF by providing downloadable conversion utilities for many computers. By December 1987, for example, an Apple IIGS user could view pictures created on an Atari ST or Commodore 64.
No, I’m genuinely curious about the different clients we, the Lemmy community, have available. Knowing their strengths and weaknesses helps people make informed choices.
GIF is a picture format. It may contain multiple frames or it may not but it is a perfectly standard pallet based image format that has been around for 37 years (for comparison its older than zip or PDF). This is not the same as linking to a 1 second YouTube video.
My current client (Boost) is also treating it as unzoomable, but that is clearly a defect in my client. Even if it was an animation I would want to be able to zoom. Its something to raise with the developer.
In the meantime I just opened the link in my browser:
https://yall.theatl.social/pictrs/image/eb5063df-4151-47d4-aeda-ac16b2f34f62.gif