Over at #aomedia on FreeNode, I saw a link (above) posted to this neat blog showing the effectiveness of replacing animated GIFs with AV1 videos.
While the general idea of using true video formats to replace short GIF animations has been implemented, with the industry support for AV1 and its clear superiority over other existing video technologies, as well as its availability in the majority of web browsers, makes now as good a time as ever.
The blog also helpfully includes some easy ffmpeg recipes showing how to make use of it.
If your browser supports it, lets see if it works for you. 🙂 This example is from the link above, I may try to make my own later.
(Firefox users may need to toggle media.av1.enabled in about:config).