Maybe I overestimated how widespread support for alternatives is. The problem seems to be to be that while most apps will support an alternative, no single format is supported everywhere (xkcd). According to another comment US messaging apps don’t support any alternatives, which is enough to keep GIF alive on its own.

I wasn’t even aware of APNG or AVIF before this thread. Webm was just the first alternative for GIFs that came to mind.

Looking at this APNG also seems to result in pretty large files whereas AVIF appears to have by far the best compression.

AVIF looks like the best alternative for sending short meme clips to people, which I assume is most peoples use case for GIFs.

Discord, Signal and Whatsapp all let you send any video format I’ve ever tried. I presume the same is true for Messenger and whatever else people use to communicate nowadays. I genuinely can’t think of anything that would support GIF but not various video formats.

Yes? I don’t really understand the question.

Please stop making gifs at all. It’s a terrible format that creates massive files that look like shit.

Webm is supported almost everywhere now and manages better quality at higher framerates and smaller file sizes.