Let’s say you’re on reddit and someone posts an imgur gallery, from an app like Boost you can view and browse that album without leaving boost.
But if I post a link to a mastodon toot that has 4 images, and I click the post in jerboa it will instead open a new window into the actual mastodon page.
I’ve argued for the value of “post once distribute everywhere” but if that paradigm isn’t right for the fediverse at the very least the ux for linking mastodon image posts could be improved. Instead of posting once distributing everywhere it would be at least possible to post once and then link everywhere. (this doesn’t fix issues like trying to get stuff like pixelfed working but it’s worth a thought)
That’s because reddit is their own image host, and built in multi picture functionality. We use pictrs as our picture host, and they’d rather not create albums. Either way lemmy-native-albums wouldn’t be good for federation anyway.
But this works when it’s hosted on imgur too. Or maybe that’s just an RES feature I forgot wasn’t native.
Also I use the third party app client Boost which does this too. But again it’s not the actual reddit site, it’s probably doing some extra work.
imgur is a proprietary platform that also has their own unique way of doing albums. Boost is using the special reddit album feature.