I might be able to answer my own question here.
Edit: Looks like it doesn’t play unless I tap on it to open. Did I do something wrong or is that just a feature of Lemmy?
That’s a sexy robot you have there, fella.
Even in jail:

Why is he here?
Depends on what client you use. They play for me in Summit.
As someone who used to be a die-hard Sync fan, Summit is SO GOOD!!!
Yeah, I can see now that you’re right. I’ll have to shop around for apps.
Works on voyager. Also syncs well with rasputin.
Thank you! This is a really helpful community.
Works on Sync
That’s what I’m using, too. I went through the settings, but I didn’t see anything obvious.
Edit: Also I have ‘data saving’ off and the following settings:

It autoplays for me in multiple browser UIs (lemmy-ui, Photon, Tesseract, Alexandrite) as well as in the Summit, Voyager, and Thunder mobile apps. Though the frame rate is ridiculously fast in Thunder for some reason.
Thank you so much!
It must just be my app, then.
Works on Boost with “animations play by default” on.
Thanks, I’ll have to check and see if my app has those settings too.
Reporting animated gif sighting in Boost.
Thank you!
Working on Jeroba
Thanks! I guess I just picked the worst possible app.
Depends I think on how you submit the link.
I did it by upload. It looks something like this:

The preview from old.lemmy.world plays as expected.
Good to know. Thanks!
Only in the thumbnail for Alexandrite. it shows as a link when you click the post and opens in a new tab/window. It would work if the image were submitted with
like below.






