FOSSDLE PieFedPSA: Posting a YouTube video? Just post the canonical YT link
submitted by
Admiral Patrick
I get it - Google sucks for a lot of reasons. Unfortunately, they own the largest video sharing platform, and it's difficult to avoid. Many people opt to use and share links to 3rd party web interfaces that greatly de-enshittify the experience (Piped/Invidious), and I'm glad for that and that those projects exist.
That said, when sharing a YT video, *please* just share the canonical YouTube link rather than a link to a random Piped/Invidious instance and let people handle using a 3rd party interface themselves.
Why?
Most People Who Care Probably Already Have a Mechanism in Place
People who want to use 3rd party YT frontends *probably* already have a mechanism in place to deal with that: integrated Lemmy client support, browser plugin to automatically redirect YT links to their preferred instance, mobile apps that handle YT links, annoying bot, etc.
You're Forcing Someone to Use Their Non-Preferred Instance
With YouTube having a relatively small number of domains, it's infinitely easier to detect YouTube links and automatically/transparently re-write them to a Piped/Invidious instance of the user's choice than the other way around.
It's *much* more difficult to do the opposite and account for all the random Inv/Piped instances in the wild, and there's no way to really identify them by URL alone (aside from a big list which is difficult to keep up-to-date or be all-inclusive).
The Invidious/Piped server you're linking to may work well *for you*, but could be on the other side of the planet for someone else. It may also be unreliable, slow, overloaded, or otherwise sub-optimal for sharing links with a wide audience.
Combined, this makes it much more difficult for people to use a local or preferred Invidious/Piped instance while also contributing to a degraded experience.
Boulevard of Broken Links
Invidious/Piped are in a constant cat and mouse game against Google. In between Google making a change to break Invidious/Piped and those projects implementing and deploying workarounds, we end up with a lot of non-functional links that need to be re-written to another instance or back to YT. That's not even accounting for Invidious/Piped instances that shut down/go permanently offline. Again, it's infinitely easier to re-write a YT link to another Inv/Piped instance than detect every possible Inv/Piped link and redirect those.
Conclusion
So, while people's desire to de-Google is laudable, please be aware that it can also be counterproductive. Sharing the canonical YT link allows the link to avoid dying due to numerous circumstances while also making it *much* easier for Lemmy clients, browser plugins, etc to use the user's preferred instance to avoid a degraded experience.
When using the share function to get a link, delete the ? and everything after it to get rid of them tracking that share.
Eg https://youtu.be/rDbgzqR4trE
Instead of https://youtu.be/rDbgzqR4trE?si= ........
In general, solid advice. Though there are some extra params such as
start,t, andendwhich can be useful if you want to reference a specific part of a video. Sadly, though, those params are no longer honored when viewing a video embed and only now seem to work on YT proper.URLCheck (available in F-Droid) is a nice tool for inspecting URLs and removing tracking and other nonsense. It includes a lot of nice features such as:
It's handy for checking/editing links before pasting them into posts/comments, and also for checking links before you open them.
I just installed and tested out the app. I have been using Léon - The URL Cleaner for a while.
I "shared" your clearurls link to URLChecker as a quick test, and then hit the "Unshorten" button, even though I knew it wasn't a short URL. This is what it resolved it to:
Haha... Thanks?
In the end, it takes more taps to do what I want than Leon does. If I share a YouTube link, I have to press "Unshort" then "Apply" to remove useless parameters. Meanwhile, with Leon, it's already done. As soon as you share to it, it presents the plain YouTube URL with a simpler UI where the buttons have words on them instead of just icons.
Compare:
URLChecker
Leon
To be fair, it appears to have fewer features. Leon can't simply remove all parameters or check the URL status. URLChecker also had it's own quick list of share targets in that central drop-down in addition to a traditional Share button.
I think I'll keep both installed in case URLChecker does a better job with non-YouTube URLs.
Honourable mention of Léon - The URL Cleaner, which targets the same use-case.Yet URLCheck seems more advanced on first glance.
Thanks for the recommendation!
Also for a short you can just change the url from /short/(video) to /v/(video) and get the normal UI
Why do Shorts even exist? They're just videos that are worse (no time bar, cropped to portrait, description and comments etc are even harder to read)
Because YT thought they could be TikTok. I've got no other explanation. But yeah, agreed, they're just regular YT videos but worse.
Short-form content is addicting and it is working. In my country tiktok is blocked so the userbase is shifted to either Instagram Reels or YT shorts.
Personally I have them blocked on my revanced but at times I use shorts when I need some quick solution for something like shortcut to reboot graphics driver on Windows, a quick stretch to ease my neck pain etc.
YT does not (currently) show ads for those. Also you can switch between videos more readily, if you don't really care about what you are watching and just want to be "entertained" (like a toddler) for 1-3 minutes.
And from YT's standpoint, it boosts their traffic stats, while sucking in the Gen-Z watchers, who until it becomes enshittified can make great use of it.
Because they have AI voices and exciting forced captions that sparkle and bounce in the exact center of the video! Who wouldn't want that?
Now I kind of want to make a parody of what would be a traditional educational video on YouTube in the style of shorts. Like annoyingly rushed, AI voice, and huge forced captions blocking everything. Making fun of kids today who have no attention span for ordinary videos. A difficult topic like programming or CAD software.
Change it to
/watch?v=to have the normal standard YouTube URL. Since comments have no such detection, feel free to use the short URL there.If you're submitting it to Lemmy as a post (or Reddit, if you still use that), just don't share the short URL at all. Get the full
www.youtube.com/watch?v=link for maximum compatibility with cross-post detection.Especially when random piped links break on a regular basis or the instance shuts down and makes older posts way more annoying to browse.
As always, if you want to use those frontends I recommend LibRedirect: https://libredirect.github.io/ . But yes, post the genuine links for everybody else.
At least the video ID is still valid in those cases. It takes a few seconds to combine it back into a youtube.com URL but it works.
It's even easier than that - You can actually just replace the Piped hostname with "youtube.com" or another Piped/Invidious hostname and use the rest of the link as-is. Same for Invidious. They all use the same API, at least for the basic watch and embed functions.
The only problem is doing it programmatically since you have to know the link is to a Piped/Inviodious instance, and it's difficult to do by URL alone (regexing the path and params gives too many false positives).
Even better use Farside
Agreed, especially on the "broken links" part
It could also be helpful to explicitly provide the exact title and creator.
That's the dream lol.
I'm 50/50 on whether I'll click a random, nondescript YT link someone drops in the comments (at least with posts, a title is required and it'll often fetch the video metadata). My Lemmy frontend will preview YT links without leaving the app, so it's now more like 80% I'll at least give it a glance lol.
I browse lemmy on an iPad and use freetube on my pc.
I’ve mostly just been not clicking any YouTube link. It just leads me to some insurance ad.
Youtube has decided for some reason on my device that the only adds I will get is BS “brain retraining” for profit “courses”.
It’s really sad how the (mental) health industry has so much for-profit pseudoscience.
I'm 0% clicking a random YouTube link. Switch and wait for the app to load, then the video, then the ad (if applicable), then wait to figure out wtf I'm watching and why? No thanks.
Maybe even a note why this is worth clicking on, and not just a lazy teen spamming /all with anything they come across on a school night.
That may just be my preference 🤔
Fwiw both PieFed and the Tesseract front-end for Lemmy have YouTube embedding. And probably some apps too but I don't know which ones. This is the real dream: you don't even leave the post to watch it, if you want, and the preview pic is just already right there.
You might also want to strip the part of the URL that starts with
?si=since it's probably a referrer hash. For example, the URL for this popular Rick Astley video (which is not technically a Rick Roll now that I've told you)https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=0dRL2AnuQyQ10G84
vs.
https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ
(Edit: for the record...
)
My instance seems to do that for me. Making this post look very confusing for a moment
I thought it was a Lemmy default too, is it not the case?
I ses the referrer hash in mbin, so that checks out.
It was added in 0.19.6, so older instances won't have it. Edit: read the rest of the thread and you already pointed this out, d'oh.
Lemme.ee via Sync shows both links as just the base
Lemm.ee seems to do it in the browser too. If I view it on lemmy.world, though, I see the whole thing. It must be a plugin.
I just checked, it's a feature of 0.19.8
I just checked, it's a feature of 0.19.8
On Voyager mobile it shows the referral link.
Doesn’t show for me
Your instance is on 0.19.8
Possibly depends instances
I've heard those "share IDs" (as I call them) are indeed tied to your account. My worry is that some day there will be a data breach and a mass doxxing of people who shared YouTube links, so I always remove them.
Léon - The URL Cleaner
Totally agree.
I don't even bother clicking on video links on random instances. Most are broken, and the rest are incredibly slow.
Agree. I use NewPipe and csn easily open YouTube linkscin my instance, but cannot if they are posted on random instance. I would have to manually copy the video code, which I definitely won't do.
Hard agree, if you are trying to actively convince me to click on your link using an alternative front end for YouTube is the greatest way to prevent me from clicking on it in the first place. I've had enough experience with them not working that I just don't bother.
That's not to say I'm going to click on an actual YouTube link either, but you have a significantly higher chance of me clicking on a YouTube link then one of those alternate front ends that I can't guarantee safety or stability of.
Just give me the original source and if I wanted to go elsewhere I can go elsewhere.
I just wish they would understand I already have my phone and desktop redirect YouTube links to my alternate front end I don't need the help
Yep, agreed.
If I can copy the link, then good. If I can't copy, I'll pass. YT is not getting my click.
Also are you really “de-googling” if you’re just using a different frontend?
Maybe some can strip out the ads or something but I’d guess that’s always a cat and mouse game.
No ads, no "privacy" popups, no "pleeeeeease log in" popups... I dunno... Makes the platform usable for me...
This is generally good practice, as Lemmy is a link aggregator, so it needs the canonical link. If you are using an archive link, then drop it into the post, which will cover all the bases and give people options.
For a second, I thought Canonical had made a YouTube front-end.
(If you wanna make a habit of sharing piped et al because of SEO, just make sure to share the youtube link alongside it :))
As someone who works in tech, hearing the three letters S-E-O has become basically an off switch for my brain. lol.
Oh yeah there is so much marketing wishwash around it, but the general rule is the more you share a website link the likelier it is to appear higher in search engines.
Which is why out of principle I’d rather limit my sharing of links to some websites by sharing archive links instead and maximise my sharing of links from others.
I develop Tesseract which has MBFC integrated directly into it which is useless for archive links. I just twitched when I read your reply lol 😆
But you're also involved with the "Fedverse vs Disinformation" community, so I'll say this: Archive links as the main URL are a way for tabloid trash headlines to carry the same weight as reputable ones. That's my main gripe against seeing them used as the primary post URL.
Oh if you use an archive link as a main url you have to put the title of the news service in parenthesis.
ie. Trump did X (Politico) archive.is
Because yeah I completely agree with you first thing I do is check the source before I even consider the validity of the headline. Too much misinfo goes around.
This probably isn't the forum for this, lol, but there's nothing stopping someone from posting a headline from and archive link to Breitbart and putting (Bloomberg) in the title. The actual source URL being visible and linked to the post goes a long way to prevent that kind of chicanery. And if a UI hides the source URL, it's a bad UI lol.
It may get modded once someone reports the discrepancy, but in the time between it was posted and the time it gets modded, people will still see a tabloid headline thinking it's legit. (Assuming most people just read the headline which is pretty common on social media).
Something to think about.
So what is the best way to get a video out there other than YouTube?
Redgif apparently
Peertube?
¿Por qué no los dos?
Posting only the canonical YT link doesn't really help the people who are on mobile and thus have less opportunity to install or use protection. Also, people who just copy-paste a YT link blindly are also likely to copy the tracker codes. Just about every YT link I've seen shared everywhere has trackers such as
?si=.I assume by "on mobile" you mean "iOS" since on Android it's super easy to redirect YouTube links to a 3rd party app.
iOS can redirect as well.
How would one go about this?
Check out the app Opener.
Thank you. Going to give it a try.
No
If you want to use a frontend, get an extension to auto redirect. User choice and whatnot.
I use FreeTube for my youtube viewing. I have a plugin in Firefox called "Freetube Redirect" that does this for me. It works perfectly.