Fediverse @lemmy.world Admiral Patrick @dubvee.org 2 wk. ago

PSA: Posting a YouTube video? Just post the canonical YT link

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 Dreams 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.

78 comments

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, and end which 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:
  
  Url Cleaner: Uses the ClearURLs catalog to remove referral and useless parameters from the url. It also allows for common offline url redirections. Built-in catalog from https://docs.clearurls.xyz/latest/specs/rules/
  
  Unshortener: Uses https://unshorten.me/ to unshorten urls remotely.
  
  Queries remover: Displays the decoded individual url queries, which you can remove or check.
  
  It's handy for checking/editing links before pasting them into posts/comments, and also for checking links before you open them.
- 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)
  
  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
Also: By using the plain YouTube link (without "?si=" etc. parameters), you can see crossposts and duplicates.
- Yes, and avoid the youtu.be short links for the same reason.
- Didn't a recent lemmy update start stripping those out automatically? I seem to remember reading smt like this
  
  Yes 0.19.8
  
  Didn’t a recent lemmy update start stripping those out automatically?
  
  Maybe. My home server is still on 0.19.3 because reasons: https://lemmy.world/post/23471887
  
  Personally, I think that the new features outweigh the regressions but I'm not going to jump instances all the time.
- And if what a random lemmy comment I took as gospel and did no further research on is accurate; it also removes the tracking part of the link.
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
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.
  
  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
- 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'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.
I always wondered this, so I’m glad you made a topic about it. I noticed an invidious link in a post I made was broken, and I started thinking that the broken link thing might be a problem going forward, especially for the longevity of a post’s life. I do hate YouTube and I’m happy to hear that me sharing a YouTube link is usually not giving them website traffic or user info because of the actions of other lemmys. Thanks for this post!
(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.
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.
So what is the best way to get a video out there other than YouTube?
- Peertube?
- Redgif apparently
¿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.
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.