Consider switching from BlurHash to ThumbHash

[afontenot]

Pitch

I just discovered this open source alternative to BlurHash, called ThumbHash that seems to result in better quality image previews at a smaller byte cost.

I think Mastodon should consider replacing BlurHash with ThumbHash for image previews.

Motivation

In my opinion, the hidden image previews shown on Mastodon are aesthetically displeasing because they tend to do a very poor job of representing the underlying shapes. So when you click an image, rather than a sense of resolving or bringing an image into focus, the image tends to transform substantially. Switching to ThumbHash would likely result in better quality image previews at a smaller byte-cost than BlurHash.

[daprice]

I kept wondering why I was seeing bizarre colors in the BlurHash that aren’t in the actual image. Turns out BlurHash doesn’t support transparency at all which causes strange results as explained in woltapp/blurhash#100. The fact alone that Mastodon supports transparent images, BlurHash doesn’t, and ThumbHash does, should be enough reason to switch.