people get so uppity here about lemmit but it was like the low nicotine version of my AITA fix

most of what you're doing on reddit is actually giphy though if that helps; may as well get it straight from the source.

I don't have any answers but I've been off reddit for ~3 years now and haven't found alternatives for a lot of the communities that I miss.

Part of it is probably "be the change you want to see" but if you go looking, there are tons of communities that haven't had posts in years because the one person that was posting finally gave up. The most active stuff here is mostly controversial news and stuff like that. With no discovery algorithm though, I may be missing some stuff that I would otherwise be interested in because I just haven't looked for it.

tenor.com is the de facto standard used by Discord and maybe a few other places.

I just search for them or make them. There are no specific sites I go to.

As for search engines, Qwant, Kagi, DuckDuckGo, and even Bing are all ones I regularly use. Google is garbage these days.

If you're talking about a forum just for gifs, why not make one here?

Redgifs

I made a post on the lemmy creators' section almost 3 years ago asking if they would ever support gifs. Some commentors laughed at me. But the official response I got was that there was "too much overhead" with gifs. Basically, it made no sense to sense to support that format. But to me, they don't support video format either if you have to go to a 3rd party site to watch them anyway. You get what you pay for.

imgur seems to be pretty centered around gifs. A lot of people only know it as an image host but for some reason a sizeable community sprang up around it.