this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
460 points (97.3% liked)

Fediverse

29427 readers
1267 users here now

A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).

If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!

Rules

Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] someguy3 95 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (3 children)

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= ........

[–] [email protected] 55 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Also for a short you can just change the url from /short/(video) to /v/(video) and get the normal UI

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

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)

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Because YT thought they could be TikTok. I've got no other explanation. But yeah, agreed, they're just regular YT videos but worse.

[–] zerozaku 4 points 3 weeks ago

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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).

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] woelkchen 58 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Also: By using the plain YouTube link (without "?si=" etc. parameters), you can see crossposts and duplicates.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

Yes, and avoid the youtu.be short links for the same reason.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Didn't a recent lemmy update start stripping those out automatically? I seem to remember reading smt like this

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago
load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] lordnikon 14 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 weeks ago

Agreed, especially on the "broken links" part

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

It could also be helpful to explicitly provide the exact title and creator.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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 🤔

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] solidgrue 22 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

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...


)

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My instance seems to do that for me. Making this post look very confusing for a moment

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (10 children)

I thought it was a Lemmy default too, is it not the case?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

I ses the referrer hash in mbin, so that checks out.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

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.

load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks ago

Totally agree.

I don't even bother clicking on video links on random instances. Most are broken, and the rest are incredibly slow.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

(If you wanna make a habit of sharing piped et al because of SEO, just make sure to share the youtube link alongside it :))

[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks ago (12 children)

As someone who works in tech, hearing the three letters S-E-O has become basically an off switch for my brain. lol.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago

Yep, agreed.

If I can copy the link, then good. If I can't copy, I'll pass. YT is not getting my click.

[–] jaybone 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

No ads, no "privacy" popups, no "pleeeeeease log in" popups... I dunno... Makes the platform usable for me...

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

For a second, I thought Canonical had made a YouTube front-end.

load more comments
view more: next ›